Shattered
by Checkerboards
Summary: -Sorrow 3- There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery. - Dante Alighieri
1. Hemlock

The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane opened its doors for the first time in November of 1921. The building had begun life as a lovely old mansion, standing proudly in the midst of similar neighbors, each home glowing with wealth and pride. But one by one, as the madmen of the world were paraded by, the neighbors quietly moved on. Their unattended and unsellable houses fell into heaps of ruin. After ten years, nothing was left but empty shells of rotting wood that had slowly succumbed to the forces of nature. The asylum had acquired their property at laughable prices in the interests of expansion.

The asylum had changed in the following decades. Splintered wood was replaced with concrete. Padlocks were removed in favor of sliding bars, which in their turn gave way to more modern door locks. What had once been a mansion had been gutted and rebuilt into a squat brick building that sprawled over the land like a forgotten corpse.

It had been renamed, as well - administrators had tried in vain to replace the old-fashioned word 'asylum' with its more modern counterparts. It had been known as the Arkham Hospital, and the Arkham Sanitarium, and even briefly as Mercy House - but in the minds of the public, it remained forever as Arkham Asylum.

When they'd left, so many years ago, the neighbors had also abandoned their beautiful flower gardens to go to seed. The weaker plants had long since disappeared, but their hardier counterparts flourished in wide swaths across the lawns. May's lush green grass was spotted with the purples of phlox and the vivid pinky-reds of rhododendrons. In the distance, a trailing web of deep green kudzu clung to the tall fence that enclosed the grounds.

The world was a jewel, locked away behind a grid of plexiglass and iron. And in her cell, pinioned to the bed by her wrists, Sorrow didn't even have the luxury of looking at it. Her only view was the pale yellowy-beige ceiling with cracked paint showing cold grey concrete behind it. She'd fallen so far in the handful of weeks since her first capture. Just over a month ago, she'd been the head of a rather successful little gang of crooks. They'd managed to relieve Gotham of well over half a million dollars in cash alone since they'd started. Things had been going so well...

Now she was locked away in a building full of lunatics and branded as one of them. She'd been lamed, tortured, and almost killed by the very same man who was supposed to be helping her.

So she'd tried to kill herself. Who hadn't? Her abortive attempt certainly couldn't be repeated within Arkham - there were surprisingly few rooftops to dive off of, and the cells and uniforms were carefully laid out so that suicide would be impossible inside them - so the restraints around her wrists were _totally_ unnecessary. Unless, of course, the staff wanted to make absolutely certain that she wasn't going to be able to get away again...

People say that what you don't know can't hurt you. This is a false statement of gigantic proportions. Every day, people are injured and killed by things they didn't know about - the tainted meat let out by a company who didn't know about the toxins inside it, the invisibly slashed brake lines on a car owned by someone who didn't know they had an enemy, and even the surprise rattlesnake behind the couch of a deaf man. What you do not know about _can_ kill you in the grisliest of ways.

Sorrow didn't know that she was safe, to the limited extent that that word applied to anyone within the asylum. Dr. Reginald Teng, the psychiatrist who had tried to turn her into his Great Experiment, had been stripped of his title and tossed into the nearest empty cell in Stonegate Penitentiary. The administration had cracked down on all staff, examining them and their practices thoroughly to prevent another _incident_. And the ACLU members, who _loved_ cases like this, were constantly badgering the staff to be more and more humane to residents who would cheerfully have stabbed them in the eyes.

But, as in many institutions, what happened in the staff room stayed in the staff room. Doctors were expressly forbidden to discuss each other with the inmates, as always, and so no one passed on the news of Teng's fate to the people who needed to hear it most. The lion's share of the inmates knew anyway, thanks to the evening news, and those that hadn't were filled in on the details in their short visits to the rec room.

Sorrow, trapped in her cell, had been largely overlooked. Everyone knew, so everyone presumed that she knew too. They had forgotten that she'd spent her last few days on the outside holed up in her warehouse, away from all human contact, and that she hadn't been in police custody when Teng had been arrested.

She didn't know that she was safe, and so she had to assume that she wasn't. Oh, she knew very well that she'd been _reassigned_ - her new psychiatrist, Dr. Lily Soehnlean, had flounced into her cell and prattled on about how lovely it was to meet her, and how she was certain that together they could work to make everything right again - but if he was still in the asylum...if he got control of her again, she would die. He would bide his time and play nice, and slowly talk the other doctors around to his point of view - and then she'd be gone.

She refused to wait for that to happen. It wasn't that she was giving up entirely. It was simply that, faced with two options - die now on her own terms, or die a horrendously painful death at some point in the future - she'd chosen the former.

Having a plan in place was a comfort. She could deal with whatever the asylum threw at her in the meantime, as long as she had that plan to snuggle up with in the dim twilight of Arkham's night. She was in control of her own fate, even if it wasn't exactly a _good_ fate.

All of this goes a long way toward explaining why she was staring tight-lipped at the ceiling while a white-suited orderly shoved a spoonful of tuna casserole at her face. "You gotta eat sometime," he sighed.

She shook her head. No, she didn't, and they couldn't make her. Starvation wasn't the nicest way to die, but it was the only alternative left to her.

"C'mon," the orderly coaxed. "I've still got two more of you to feed, and they're gonna be getting pretty hungry soon."

"So go feed them first - _mmmph_!" She glared daggers at the orderly as he jammed the spoon into her mouth. Arkham's tuna casserole was revolting at the best of times, and being force-fed lumps of the rancid fish-and-noodle combination was _not_ going to happen if she had anything to say about it.

The orderly grinned as she made chewing motions. "There, see? Good girl. _Hey_!" he yelped as the mouthful of casserole splatted neatly onto his pristine uniform.

"Get the hell away from me," she snarled.

"You're gonna eat this whether you want to or not," he snapped, grabbing her chin.

Fifteen minutes later, the plate was empty. Not that she'd eaten any of the food - in that respect, she'd won. In the process, though, she'd completely covered herself with bits of slimy casserole.

"You're disgusting," the orderly muttered, gathering up the dishes.

"Says the man with tuna in his ear," Sorrow said sweetly back.

He furiously dug it out with one finger, wiping the greyish fish fastidiously on one of the few remaining white patches on the front of his uniform. "To hell with this," he muttered. "I'll make Horace give you dinner."

"Don't bother. I won't eat it."

He rolled his eyes. "You'll eat, sooner or later. We'll see to that."

_I'd like to see you try_, Sorrow thought mutinously as he slammed her door.

* * *

The following days lumbered past at slightly under the speed of a tranquilized elephant. Sorrow spent most of it sprawled on her hard little bed, watching the sunlight drift in its regular pattern around her cell. It was remarkably easy to just lay back and let life happen around her.

They'd tried to get her to eat. Orderlies and doctors alike had alternately cajoled and threatened her with every privilege and punishment they had to offer. It didn't matter. Nothing really mattered anymore.

Today's orderly had barely been in her cell for five minutes with his hateful little tray. She let her head loll to the side and smirked at a crack in the ceiling. They were finally getting the point that she was _not_ going to eat, no matter how weak she'd started to feel. Thankfully, the hunger had melted away into nausea at some point in the early days, so now she didn't even physically want to eat anything they brought to her.

Dr. Lily, flanked by a pair of orderlies, swung the door of her cell open. "You didn't eat your lunch," she accused softly, with a glance at her clipboard.

Sorrow shrugged.

"Or breakfast. You didn't eat last night, or the day before that..." Lily flipped through papers. "You haven't eaten for over a week. You have to eat something."

Sorrow shrugged again.

"You can't go on like this. What's _wrong_?" Lily pleaded. "Whatever it is, we can work on it together. I only want to help you, but I can't help if you won't talk to me!"

With a tilt of her head, Sorrow considered her for a moment. If she just told Lily - but no, that was a bad idea. Hadn't she been through enough to teach her that psychiatrists didn't _really_ care about people like her? At any rate, she'd told Teng virtually nothing and he'd spun it into a web of lies to rival that of Baron Munchhausen's. What would happen if she went to a doctor with an actual problem? No, it was better to remain silent.

"You still won't talk to me?" Lily asked, a slightly wounded tone creeping into her voice as Sorrow looked back to the ceiling. "Not one word?" She paused, waiting for an answer that would never come. When the silence had stretched on too long, she sighed bitterly and tucked her papers back into their pile. "Then I'm afraid we have no other choice."

Dr. Lily set the clipboard down on the floor near the farthest wall and knelt next to it, fumbling with something that Sorrow couldn't see. One of the massive orderlies began undoing her wrist buckles, keeping a careful watch on her free hand as he unbuckled the other. She stretched and bent her wrists, wishing fervently that someone had taken the time to pry her out of Teng's gloves. A few little slaps and she could have been gone...

A rusty antique gurney squeaked into the room, followed by the second orderly. The narrow green cushions were split and taped together after years of abuse. And on the back, hovering over the headrest like a metal spider, was an intricate rack with a set of IV bags dangling from it.

Sorrow's scream could have broken mirrors. The orderlies pounced on her and did their best to transfer her thrashing body onto the new gurney while keeping one ear pressed to their shoulders to block out the sound. It was happening _again_, it was happening _again_, she had to get _out_...

"I told you to get the _other_ gurney," Lily snapped, turning from the corner. A small syringe glinted in one hand.

"Other one's broken," the orderly shrugged, wincing as Sorrow slammed a numb knee into his hip.

"You could have at least waited until I gave her this," Lily scolded, weaving deftly between the orderlies. "It's for your own good, Sorrow," she said, slipping the needle into her arm.

Arguing did no good. Pleading did no good. The only possible thing that could save her now was fighting - but the drug slinking through her veins was making her arms heavy...her eyelids creaked shut without her approval and the world went away.

* * *

Federal regulations state that restraints are only to be used under the strictest of strict conditions. The misbehaving inmates are to be held in the least restrictive setting possible to stop them from harming themselves or others, and restraints are only to be used for four-hour stretches without further consultations with the doctor who ordered their usage.

In Arkham Asylum, particularly in the hallway that housed the rogues, things worked a little differently. Arkham was funded largely by the government, and anyone who has ever worked in a governmental facility will tell you that getting necessary funds requires hours of begging, threats, and shouted complaints. With a shoestring budget, the asylum could only afford so many staff members - and of those, the turnover rate was astonishing. The ones that remained demanded raise after raise, which the administration had to grant, or face losing half of their staff.

To put it simply, Arkham couldn't afford to care for their inmates as they were supposed to. The orderly that legally should have been watching Sorrow one-on-one the entire time that she was restrained had been called away to walk rogues to their therapy appointments, clean up the unholy mess in the lunchroom, and tend to all the other tedious tasks that filled an orderly's time. There were the things that _had_ to be done to keep the place going, and then there were the mindless chores that weren't technically necessary like sitting and watching someone lay motionless and asleep on a bed.

Sorrow cracked a bleary eye open. The paint cracks on the ceiling spun and crossed over one another before settling into their accustomed spots. She fought to lift her head and saw the IV tubing sticking out of her arm. The bag next to her was nearly empty.

She'd been asleep for some time, then. He'd be coming soon. She had to get out, had to...had to do _something_...

They hadn't strapped her legs down. She still had enough feeling in them to raise her thighs and swing them back and forth, sending her useless calves swaying beneath them as she rocked. The wheels of the gurney started to lift ever so slightly off of the ground. _One more_...

The gurney fell to the ground with a metallic, rattling _crash_. Sorrow wiggled her knees up to her waist and numbly shoved her feet against the mattress until she lay in a somewhat crouching position over the headrest. Chains rattled on her gloved hands as she stretched them as far as they'd go under the bed, fumbling at the buckles holding the straps on until they parted under her fingertips.

She was free. She smacked the gurney until the wheels spun on their rusty swivels. Free!

But not for long. They'd be back at any moment. Well, maybe she could pry something useful out of this tangle of metal...and, as fortune would have it, the old, rusty legs of the gurney were practically falling apart as it was.

Twenty minutes passed before an orderly came by, arms loaded with filthy bedsheets. He glanced in, expecting to see Sorrow limply sleeping. Instead, she was seated on the floor, surrounded by wreckage that had formerly been a serviceable gurney. "Hey!" he yelped. Bedsheets scattered over the tile like fallen leaves as he wrenched his radio off of his belt. "Assistance needed, Cell 4R27, Four - Are - Two - Seven," he barked, fumbling the key into the lock with his free hand. The door creaked open as he stuffed the radio back into its holster.

Sorrow, armed with a heavy wheeled gurney leg, glared at him. "Stay away," she growled.

"Drop it," he warned, taking a step closer. In reply, Sorrow swung the heavy metal leg like a baseball bat. Little flakes of rust peeled off of it and left a brownish spatter of oxidized metal over the remains of the gurney.

Wild footsteps echoed in the hall as orderlies responded to the alarm. "Who the hell was supposed to be watching her?" the first orderly demanded, pointing at the jumbled mess of metal covering the floor of the cell. A general mumble of an answer indicated that no one had been told anything about her. They clustered together in the doorway, forming their battle plan as Sorrow tightened her grip on the long metal bar.

The orderlies slammed into action. Five of them dove into the cell, each aiming for their specific target - an arm, a leg, the iron bar - and two of them peeled away to fetch a replacement gurney and someone with the authority to dispense massive amounts of tranquilizers. The five inside the cell fought Sorrow, flailing and screaming, to the ground, pinning her solidly under their combined weight. The ones on her hands took the opportunity to double- and triple-check the handcuffs securing the gloves to her wrists.

Time passes slowly when you're being held. In Sorrow's case, it felt like an hour had passed, mashed out of existence by sweaty men in cheap cotton clothing. They filled her sight, talking to one another about anything but her as they kept her pressed to the linoleum. Then, seemingly from nowhere, there was the sting of a needle as it burned into her hip, and the world faded out like the end of a bad movie.

* * *

Being Poison Ivy's therapist was akin to being the nursemaid of a very spoiled toddler. Dr. Tanaka had heard tales in the past of Ms. Isley's previous therapists. Most had not had happy endings. True, she rarely _killed_ her doctors, but she was adept at making their lives absolutely miserable if they did not do things her way.

The first impression, she'd decided, was absolutely fundamental to winning Pamela's trust. She scoured her office of anything that might irk or upset the botanist, down to the lack of notepads on the desk and the special metal chairs. She'd even changed her soap to something unscented.

It had worked, to some degree. When Ivy had first come into her office, she'd obviously anticipated being able to rip into the doctor about her abuse of plants. When there was no abuse to be found, Ivy had unconsciously given the doctor a little more credit than her therapists normally received. (This wasn't to say that she _liked_ her - after all, she was still a human, and humans were _bad_.)

Dr. Tanaka had managed to stay on as Pamela's therapist for six years. In that time, since Pamela refused to talk about herself in any therapeutic fashion, they'd had the same conversations approximately three hundred times each - Plants are Good, Harley Needs A New Boyfriend, and Arkham Is Bad.

They were halfway through Arkham Is Bad on this particular day. Dr. Tanaka was focused on Pamela, her bright little eyes sparkling in the lights as she nodded agreement to each of the tired old complaints - the food was terrible, the beds weren't comfortable, she wasn't allowed enough plants in her cell...

"And the staff are getting _entirely_ too overreactive," Pamela said. "I mean, _really_. Do you honestly think it should take seven men to restrain one woman?"

"It would depend on what you were doing directly before the staff intervened," Tanaka said.

Pamela's eyes flashed irritation with a world too stupid to understand her the first time around. "Not _me_," she sighed. "Sorrow."

Dr. Tanaka remained outwardly motionless. Inside, though, the bit of her mind concerned with solving the mystery of Pamela's psyche sat up like a hunting dog hearing a faint quacking in the reeds. "I think I might have missed that event," the doctor lied. As long as Pamela felt smarter or more well-informed than her, she'd keep talking.

Pamela rolled her deep green eyes to the ceiling. "It happened last week." Pamela recounted the events as she'd seen them from her cell just down the hall.

Dr. Tanaka nodded and made the correct concerned noises as Pamela railed about the sheer ineptitude of the staff. Inside, though, she was jumping up and down excitedly. Pamela did not talk about other people with any sense of camaraderie, with the exception of Harley Quinn, and yet she almost sounded..._sympathetic_ to Sorrow's situation. (Sympathetic, for Pamela, generally meant not instantly wanting to kill them - but it was a start, nonetheless.) Any hint of seeming to care about other people, no matter how small, had to be encouraged.

Tiny Dr. Tanaka clicked through a few files on her PDA. "Yes," she mused, looking at a file containing a recipe for sauerbraten. "Yes, I see that in her records..." She put the PDA back into her drawer. "I wonder if...no, I wouldn't want to impose on you," she murmured, folding her hands.

"What?"

"I'm sorry, it was just a thought. But you were saying..." Tanaka trailed off.

"What were you going to ask?" Pamela asked suspiciously.

_Careful, careful_. "I was thinking that...well, it was you that first alerted us to the situation with Sorrow's former doctor. You're obviously a little more perceptive than we are, in this case," Tanaka said with a little uneasy chuckle. "If you could talk to her..."

Pamela regarded her cautiously. Dr. Tanaka fidgeted in the privacy of her mind. Had she gone too far with the flattery? Psychiatry was so much harder than most other breeds of medicine. They, at least, had room for a little trial-and-error. If she made a mistake with Pamela, she could kiss her working relationship with her goodbye. An orderly opened the door, and she waved her away for a few more minutes.

"What do you mean, talk to her?" Pamela finally asked.

Waves of relief tingled down her back. She hadn't seen through her. "Well, she's been going through some problems...she hasn't been eating, for one thing. If you could maybe convince her to start again, we'd really appreciate it. I might even be able to convince Dr. Carlson that you deserve to have that plant you've been wanting," she coaxed.

"I'll do it," Pamela agreed. Tanaka smiled and thanked her as the orderly re-entered and took her away. When she was fully gone, Tanaka reached into her bottom drawer and pulled out her notebook. If she could get Pamela to interact positively with Sorrow, it would be another tiny step toward regaining her sanity. And if she convinced Sorrow to start eating again, that would just be icing on the cake.

* * *

Permission for the visit wasn't given for nearly a week. By that time, Ivy had almost forgotten about it. She'd occupied herself today with the two little plants she was allowed, cradling the stems in her arms and letting the leaves wrap lovingly around her fingertips. But two minutes ago, her usual pair of female orderlies had swung her door open and beckoned her outside. Why they needed two guards to take her ten feet down the hallway was beyond her.

Nevertheless, with thoughts of that third promised plant dancing in her mind, Ivy strolled calmly down the hall and waited while her orderlies bickered with Sorrow's. "She can't go in!" the men were protesting. "_We_ can barely get near her!"

There was a monstrous crash from inside, as if someone had dropped a Ming vase. "Get the hell _out_ of here!" Sorrow bellowed. A mischievous little smile sparked onto Ivy's face.

She'd done a lot of thinking since that session. It was good that the doctors were finally recognizing how useless they were. Maybe one day they'd pack up and leave...or, more likely, they'd go back to leaving the rogues alone, just like they used to. Something about that conversation had bothered her, though, and it had taken her a while to pin it down.

Tanaka had almost sounded like she thought Ivy cared about Sorrow. That was an uncomfortable thought. Ivy _didn't_ care about Sorrow - or rather, she didn't _want_ to care. She wanted to remain just as she'd been a few years ago, when humans were bad and plants were good. It had been simple, then.

But then Harley Quinn had come along - sweet, chirpy little Harley who wouldn't let Ivy brush her away. And slowly, grudgingly, Ivy's love of plants had to give way ever so slightly to make room for a friendship with a silly, perky jester who would not be ignored.

The cracks in her defenses were starting to crumble a little more around Sorrow. It wasn't that she cared personally for her - she hadn't exactly been endearing, in the little time that they'd known one another. No, she cared more about Sorrow because of _what_ she was. It was a kinship of sorts. On the surface, they were vaguely alike - red hair, a poisonous touch - but it was more than that. If nothing else, they'd both been experimented on by men who thought that their research was more important than their subjects. Ivy knew the kind of betrayal that took inside and out. If anyone knew what it was like to be Sorrow, it was Poison Ivy - and if anyone could snap Sorrow into behaving as a rogue _should_ at Arkham, it was Ivy as well.

Though, from the amount of epithets flying from the orderly inside her cell, she wasn't going to need much persuading on _that_ point. "Are you sure?" one of the men asked as the other scurried out of the room, holding a tray full of shattered ceramic. "She's mean today."

"She's _always_ mean," the other said, dumping the tray hurriedly onto the lunch cart.

"Doctor's orders," the woman behind Ivy said. The male orderlies shrugged and stepped aside. 'Doctor's orders' was the magic phrase in Arkham. If doctors ordered it, orderlies obeyed - which was how Sorrow had gotten into such a mess in the first place.

Ivy sauntered past the orderlies into the little cell. Sorrow was glaring at the wall, ignoring the gaggle of orderlies in the hall as they talked to one another about her. "Get out," she snapped.

"Good morning to you, too."

Sorrow's head snapped around, sending her uncombed, greasy hair flying in a stringy puff around her head. "Ivy?"

Ivy nodded a hello and looked around the stark little cell. Patients were normally allowed up to three personal items for therapeutic reasons. Apparently, no one had seen fit to pass that information on to Sorrow, since her walls were empty. Ivy brushed down the front of her dull grey uniform and seated herself regally on the bed by Sorrow's waist.

"What are you doing here?" Sorrow whispered, glancing at the guards.

Ivy shrugged. "They said I should come and visit you." She ran a long green finger over a wrinkle in the blanket, lovingly smoothing out the remains of the poor mangled cotton plants that had gone into its manufacture. The orderlies were muttering to one another in the hallway.

Time to earn her plant. "Why aren't you eating?" she asked, locking eyes with Sorrow.

Sorrow shrugged and turned her face to the wall. "I'm not hungry."

Ivy narrowed suspicious green eyes. "Just like you weren't hungry at my greenhouse?"

"No. Yes," Sorrow muttered. "What's the point? I'm going to die anyway."

With a snort of disbelief, Ivy rolled her eyes. "Oh, you are _not_," she said, as if telling a toddler that monsters really _weren't_ under the bed.

"How can you say that?" Sorrow hissed, glaring at her. "You know what happened!"

"Yes, I do. It _happened_. It's _over_."

"How the hell is it _over_?" Sorrow mocked, rattling her restraints.

"It's not going to happen again!" Teng was in prison! Why on earth did she think that he could possibly still hurt her?

"Sure it won't." Metal clattered on metal as Sorrow yanked pointedly on her wrist restraints again.

"It won't if you do what you're supposed to!" Ivy sighed. Rogues were many things inside Arkham - violent, wary, and delusional were generally the top three choices - but they were never suicidal. They never just gave in! There was a certain code of behavior that went along with being one of the Batman's adversaries that Sorrow clearly wasn't following. In the spirit of helpfulness (or, more realistically, in the spirit of letting the orderlies hear what the doctor wanted them to hear) Ivy said "Just do what they want and you'll get through this. Okay?"

"Do what they want," Sorrow said flatly.

"Yes!"

"Fine." Moving at the speed of desperation, Sorrow thrust herself upward and buried her head into Ivy's shoulder. Ivy sat there, stunned, until she felt teeth sinking into her exposed neck.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" Ivy shrieked, stumbling backward.

Sorrow, with a tiny smear of Ivy's toxic greenish-brown blood on her lips, fell back onto her pillow. "'M sorry," she mumbled. "Was the only way..."

Ivy turned imperiously to the orderlies. "She _bit_ me!" she announced, gesturing with bloody fingers to the set of teethmarks in her neck. Her pair of orderlies raced inside, fumbling with their waist packs. But rather than tend to Ivy's injured neck, they were breaking out the antidotes and injecting all of them into Sorrow.

Ivy sighed dramatically and leaned against the doorframe, watching the pointless activity. If she wanted to kill herself so badly, let her. She'd never understand why Arkham wasted so much time and money on people who didn't want to live anymore.

At least she'd probably get a plant out of all of this.

* * *

The rec room buzzed with the quiet hum of busy inmates. Cards thwacked down onto heavy metal tables. The television, tuned to CNN, blared gentle monotony at the cluster of inmates keeping a careful eye on the government.

In the corner, Ivy was playing with the fronds of the fern while she decided on her new acquisition. Should it be an azalea? Jequirity? Maybe a nice lily...they were poisonous to cats, after all, and she was _certain_ she could tweak its toxicity enough to get her out of this place sooner, rather than later.

"Hiya, Red!" Harley chirped, flopping down in a nearby chair.

"Mmm," Ivy said, mostly ignoring her.

"What happened to your neck?" Harley demanded, noticing the tiny white square of bandage.

"Sorrow bit me."

"She..._bit_ ya?" Harley frowned. "That doesn't sound like her."

Ivy absently dusted a fleck of lint from a leaf. "She was trying to kill herself," she said, with the tone of one discussing a budding chef's inability to distinguish flour from salt.

"She _what_?"

"I'm poison, remember, Harley?" Ivy explained condescendingly.

Harley stuck out her tongue. "I kinda figured that out, Red!" she snapped. "Why's she tryin' to off herself?"

Ivy shrugged. "Who cares?"

"You do," Harley said.

"I do not. I don't like humans."

"You do too!" Harley repeated. "I can tell by the way yer tryin' to snap the arm of your chair off. If you _really_ didn't like her, you wouldn't be gettin' angry."

Ivy, glaring at Harley, slowly uncurled her hand from the death grip it had had on the chair. "Anything else you'd like to share?" she said frostily.

Harley, used to Ivy's moods, ignored her. "We've gotta do somethin'," she mused, twirling a blonde pigtail around one finger. A spark of inspiration lit her face like the sun. "I know how we can fix it! Kinda."

Ivy inwardly moaned with frustration. _We_ meant Harley wasn't going to shut up about it until Ivy pitched in to help. At times like this, killing everyone in sight and going home was looking more and more attractive. "What's your plan?" she sighed.

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: Arkham's history is partly from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. The bit on proper usage of four-point restraints was taken from the HCFA/JCAHO standards for 2000. _


	2. Half the Battle

It was difficult to concentrate inside Arkham Asylum's recreation room. Normally, the Riddler was able to block out the sounds, sights (and, unfortunately, _smells_) of the other inmates that milled about in the little room. Today, though, something was breaking through his concentration.

Was it the television? No, he was used to cartoons at this hour. He could ignore them. Was it the irregular metallic squealing from the construction workers' equipment out on the lawn, repairing the latest hole in the fence? No, he'd dealt with that noise often enough as well...

It couldn't be thoughts about his henchgirls. _Ex-_henchgirls. That would be ridiculous, and a waste of time. Henchgirls came and went, he knew that. In fact, he'd been the driving force behind most of their departures, whether that had meant simply leaving them for the Batman or officially kicking them out. The fact that his newest pair had decided to seek greener pastures with the Mad Hatter (of all people, the _Mad Hatter_!) wasn't upsetting him even slightly. Really. It wasn't. He was perfectly capable of doing his crossword without thoughts of those two ingrates bothering him.

He shifted irritably on the couch. Instead of the normal creak of wood or rustle of fabric, the couch let loose with the distinctive snapping and grinding noises made by medication under pressure. He rolled his eyes and slipped a hand beneath the cushions, extracting a jumble of brightly colored pills. Blue-and-white Geodon nestled cozily next to baby-pink lithium, surrounded by a loose ring of orange Thorazine tablets.

"Heya, Eddie!" The Riddler glanced up to see Harley Quinn perching on the arm of the sofa next to him. "They've got ya on _those_?" she said disbelievingly as she poked at a trio of little white Tegretol.

"**Denture smog**," he muttered. Harley regarded him with the patient blank stare that she reserved for the occasions in which she needed a riddle-to-English translation. "They're not mine," Eddie explained, tossing them gently in his cupped palm. "I found them in the couch."

"It's amazin' what people leave there, isn't it?" Harley chirped. "I remember once, the first time I went home with Mistah J? I dropped my makeup down the couch an' when I went to pull it out, it felt all squidgy. Turns out I grabbed some poor jerk's hand instead!"

"Where was the rest of him?"

"Who knows?" Harley shrugged. "Puddin' said he couldn't take a joke." Ah, yes. Seriousness - the number one killer among Joker henchmen. Harley shifted uneasily on the arm of the sofa and plucked a pill out of his hand, examining it with her full attention as if she was trying to work up the courage to ask him something. But that was ridiculous! What would she ever want from _him_? She was holding the sky-blue Klonopin between thumb and forefinger, examining him through the tiny K-shaped hole that had been stamped through the center. Then, with a tiny pink sliver of tongue protruding, she rolled the pill into position and fired it off like a small, airborne marble. It bounced off the lens of the nearest security camera with an audible _plink_ and came to rest in the middle of the chessboard, where Jonathan Crane sat idly planning chess moves. He absently brushed the thing onto the floor with the back of his hand, as if flying medication was a phenomenon as common as violence on the evening news.

"Two points!" Harley crowed. "Anyway, Eddie, I had a favor to ask ya."

He'd been right! (Well, of _course_ he'd been right. Would he ever be wrong?) "What?" he asked suspiciously.

"Nothin' much," Harley said casually, examining the toe of one laceless shoe. "You still stealin' paper from arts-n-crafts?"

"Why would I steal paper?" Eddie said dismissively, trying to hide the twinge of shock that twitched up his back. He'd thought no one had been paying attention...

"I dunno. But I saw ya doin' it last Wednesday. Remember? Origami day?" She grinned devilishly at him. "An' there's a bit stickin' out of yer sleeve from this mornin'."

Eddie hurriedly jammed the sky-blue corner of paper back into his shirt. "For your information, they keep taking my notebooks," he scowled, "and I have to have _something_ to write on."

"Don't they find the paper when they toss yer cell?"

"I hide it in the mattress," he informed her loftily. There was certainly enough room in there...over the years, he'd popped spring after spring out to use as lockpicks, and now there was more paper than bedspring keeping him supported at night.

"Can I have some?"

"Of my _mattress_?"

She playfully shoved him. "No, silly. The paper!"

"Why?"

"For Sorrow."

Eddie frowned. The last he'd heard, Sorrow had gone fully off the deep end and was paddling around in a flood of psychosis. "I repeat: Why?" he asked.

Harley blew a sigh upward, dislodging stray hairs that lay across her forehead. "I've got a plan. Oooh!" She brightened. "You could help!" She laid out Stage One of her plan for him, complete with expressive hand gestures and an occasional bounce of excitement.

Eddie eventually agreed to go along with it. It was something to fill the time, after all, and...well, Sorrow had been looking at him once, hadn't she? Maybe he could bypass the bother of hiring more fickle henchgirls and forge an alliance with her. Having someone with powers around was nearly always worth it...and at least another rogue wouldn't abandon him for the Mad Hatter.

* * *

Harley's current goals were rather simple. Through the asylum grapevine, she'd heard that the Joker would be stuck in solitary for the foreseeable future. Much as she hated to admit it, it would be impossible for her to persuade the doctors to let him out sooner. For some reason, they just didn't understand that she knew what was best for him! In the meantime, she had to fill her time with _something_.

Ivy had managed to get a new plant, and Harley had sat through hours of prattle about it. Red was like a mom with a new baby, only without the snapshots. Thank _God_ there were no snapshots. It was bad enough to hear endless soliloquies about the specific curves and lines of one stem, let alone be forced to nod and smile over endless repetitive pictures of them. Harley, never one to appreciate plants, was sick of hearing about the stupid thing.

That left her with one possible companion: Sorrow. Everyone else was too wrapped up in their own dignity to giggle over silly things with her. Well, at the moment, Sorrow wasn't exactly cheerful either, but Harley was determined to fix that. It would be like a game - and she could prove that she was still a better therapist than anyone here!

Of course, that meant that the doctors would have to be prodded into letting her try. "I'd only like to go see her," she pleaded at her next therapy session. It had been the same for two weeks - ask, and plead, and beg...well, _this_ time would be different.

Dr. Jackson regarded her from under bushy black eyebrows. "No," he snapped. "You heard about what happened last time."

"Yeah, but doc, _I'm_ not poisonous," Harley pointed out. "An' I only wanna help her!"

"Yes, right out of the asylum," he snorted. "No deal."

"Please?"

"No."

"Pleeeeeeease?"

"_No_." He tapped his pen emphatically on his notepad. "We've got ten minutes left. What else would you like to talk about?"

Harley sighed. Well, if asking nicely hadn't worked..."Oh, we could talk about a lotta things," she said cheerfully. "We could talk about that new car you got last month!" The pen started slowing down. "Or we could talk about that new house ya got last year!" The pen tapped slower and slower.

Harley leaned forward, looking the doctor square in the eyes. "We could talk about that bank account you've got down on Berry Island," she added pleasantly. "The one that Dr. Carlson doesn't know about?"

Dr. Jackson stared at her. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said flatly.

"Sure ya do," she chirped. "It's under the name _Lyle Rupert_, yer sons' names...cute, Doc, no one _ever_ woulda guessed that..."

"You can see her next week," Dr. Jackson grunted. "_Provided_ that you forget all about that account, which doesn't exist," he added pointedly.

"What account?" Harley said brightly.

* * *

History is full of people who have done impulsively stupid things when the opportunity arose. Grabbing an electric fence to see what it feels like, reaching out to pet that friendly-looking bear at the zoo, leaning out to catch a not-quite-foul ball at a baseball game...Impulsive stupidity seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, as much an instinct as breathing in and out.

It had been a bad decision for Sorrow to bite Poison Ivy. Never mind the fact that making a rogue bleed was probably one of the few ways to skyrocket straight to the top of their Revenge List. No, the stupidity had lay mostly in the fact that she'd done it inside Arkham.

Of course they'd had an antidote to Ivy's particular brand of toxins. Ivy had, after all, been a major force in Gotham's underworld for years now, with a large portion of that time spent inside these very walls. Of _course_ they'd have developed something to counteract her poisonous blood. Otherwise, the guards would have probably been wearing full bio-hazard suits around her at all times.

The only comfort that Sorrow could draw out of the whole situation was that she hadn't consciously made the decision to gnaw on Ivy's neck. Some primitive function in her brain had connected the relevant information - _I need to die, and she's lethal_ - and she was tasting blood before she knew what was happening.

Well, she wouldn't get a chance to try that again, or anything like it. She also wasn't going to get a chance to yank her IV needle out or wriggle out of her restraints as she had previously. The gurney they'd gotten to replace the one she'd destroyed was short, squat, and made of such heavy and sturdy materials that tipping it over would be almost impossible. To top it off, they'd stuck the IV needle in her foot and run the tubing like a strand of Christmas lights up and away from her. It was maddening, particularly since they'd strapped her legs down and secured the needle with almost half a roll of tape.

She glared impotently at the wretched mess of plastic dangling over the gurney. Disgusting white liquid dripped quietly through the tubes as it made its way toward her bloodstream. If she'd known that they could feed people intravenously, she would have found a quicker way to kill herself...somehow...Then again, _if she'd known_ covered a lot of nasty territory. If she'd known what would happen to her, she probably wouldn't have pulled that last bank job, for starters...

A tear, hot with self-pity, leaked out of her eye. She hastily scraped her face against her shoulder, blotting it out before anyone saw. Crying wasn't the answer. Crying never helped.

But...what else was there to do? She was trapped, and soon Dr. Teng would show up with his needles and his chemicals and start the whole thing over again. More tears joined the first, running in tiny rivulets down her face and into the collar of her scratchy asylum uniform.

As if the world were privy to her thoughts, there was a familiar clicking as the door lock opened. Sorrow stiffened, expecting the worst, and hurriedly dried her eyes on her other shoulder.

The heavy metal door swung open. "Hey, kiddo!" Harley Quinn stood framed in the doorway, holding a patchworked tube of paper. "Long time no see!"

"Harley?" Sorrow asked disbelievingly. It couldn't be her. The doctors would _never_ let her come visit, not after Ivy...

* * *

Harley grinned cheerfully at Sorrow. She looked better than she'd expected. Maybe Phase Five would need a little adjustment or two.

"I brought'cha a lil' present, Sorrow, from me an' Eddie." In point of fact, the picture - Phase One - was supposed to be from Harley and _Ivy_, but that idea hadn't gone down too well. Ivy had pitched a major fit about the very idea of taking mutilated and dyed bits of her babies and desecrating the remains to make a stupid _picture_. Harley looked around the room, examining the wallspace, then glanced over at Sorrow.

"Huh. I got it!" Harley clambered up onto the bed and balanced on tiptoe by Sorrow's bound wrists. With a few pieces of tape liberated from the roll around her own wrist, she secured the picture to the ceiling. "There ya go, S-girl!" she chirped, bouncing down to the floor.

Sorrow's eyes widened, darting toward each section of the picture in turn. Harley smiled proudly at the look of surprise on her face. It had been tricky to make, particularly since they weren't allowed scissors or glue, but they'd managed to tear and tape enough paper together to make an approximate rendition of Gotham's docks at night. A gum-wrapper moon shone down on a crinkly cellophane sea, while dingy grey pamphlet buildings adorned with pale med-schedule gargoyles thrust themselves into the scribbly black nighttime sky.

"It's…it's beautiful, Harley," Sorrow murmured.

"Yeah, see, I knew what it looked like cuz Mistah J. had a place down there once, so I spent a lotta time outside, ya know? An' Eddie got all the paper, and then we made it for ya in the rec room one day." Sorrow continued to examine the picture. Harley beamed triumphantly. Phase One had obviously been a success.

If Harley Quinn had one talent, it was reading people. It had gotten her through college, it had gotten her a staff position at Arkham, and it had kept her alive longer than any other Joker associate on record. Sorrow may have been saying that the picture was beautiful, but what she really _meant_ was that she was surprised and somewhat grateful that someone seemed to care about her - which was just the reaction that Harley had intended to elicit.

"So how're things?" Harley asked conversationally, flopping down on the bed.

Sorrow shrugged. "Fine."

"Fibber," Harley teased, flicking her gently on the nose. "I heard you haven't been eating. Can't blame ya, the food here's not much," she added lightly. "It's gotta be better than _that_, though." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the array of IV racks and tubing leading into Sorrow's bare foot.

"I'm not hungry," Sorrow muttered mutinously.

"Maybe not for the slop they give ya. What you need is..." Harley paused, eyes twinkling, "a _sammich_."

"A sandwich?" Sorrow shook her head. "No, thanks."

"Not a sandwich," Harley corrected. "A _sammich_. Sammiches are better!"

Sorrow, lips tightened, shook her head again. "I made you that picture," Harley pointed out. "The least you could do is eat a sammich for me." Sorrow's lip slowly started sneaking between her teeth. Indecision! Harley pressed her point. "C'mon, promise Harley yer gonna at least eat one lil' sammich," she wheedled. "Puh-leeeeeeeeeeze? I'll sing ya a song!"

Sorrow ducked her head. Whether she'd meant to look away or agree, Harley didn't know, and she wasn't about to ask. "All right! We have a deal! One sammich for one song!"

"I didn't say that-" Sorrow sputtered to a halt as Harley pressed a finger over her protesting lips.

"C'mon, you'll wanna see this!" Without further ado, she launched into a somewhat squeaky rendition of "Say That We're Sweethearts Again", posing theatrically in place so that Sorrow could see. "You like? It's from a movie er a musical er somethin'," Harley said, tilting her head and making her pigtails bounce.

Sorrow nodded slowly and actually cracked a smile! "Yeah. It was really… appropriate."

"So it was worth a sammich?" Harley demanded, grinning.

"Yeah, it was worth a sandwich," Sorrow admitted.

"Hey, hot stuff! Get this girl a sammich!" Harley ordered one of the orderlies in their cluster by the door. He scowled at her and left, nametag bouncing as he stomped indignant feet into the floor.

"You mean…eat it now?"

"Yeah! HEY HOT STUFF, GET ME ONE TOO!" she bellowed through the open door. "We can have a little afternoon snack." She glanced over her shoulder. The orderlies weren't watching too closely. In fact, they were elbowing one another in the ribs and chuckling over their associate's rapid departure. Harley shot a wink at Sorrow and quickly unbuckled her wrist. "Can't eat without an arm!" she whispered conspiratorially.

The orderly was back with the sandwiches on two paper plates. Harley snatched them from his hands. "Thanks, hot stuff!" she said merrily. "Dismissed."

The orderly glared at her and stamped out, hissing epithets under his breath. He may have turned down a direct order from Sorrow, or from any of the other lower-level rogues, but he was smart enough to know that the day he turned down an order from Harley would probably end in his untimely death. Sorrow was flexing her fingers, stretching her arm, and totally ignoring the sandwich that lay on her chest. She opened her mouth to say something.

Her mouth was promptly filled with sandwich. "Mmmf!" she grunted, raising her free hand to pull the unwanted food out. She paused when she realized that Harley's hand was still there, holding it firmly to her face.

"Bite," Harley ordered. "I hear you're good at that."

Sorrow swallowed indignantly. "I didn't _mean_ to bite - _mmmf_!"

"Keep goin'," Harley said happily, taking a bite of her own snack. "You owe me a whole sammich, remember."

Sorrow, with her mouth full, obviously knew that arguing would get her nowhere. "Why do you call him that? Hot stuff?" she asked, not swallowing, obviously hoping that would keep Harley from stuffing her face again.

"Mmmf…his first day here, his badge read H. Stufington…H. Stuff. Hot Stuff!" exclaimed Harley, spraying breadcrumbs everywhere. "Reads Horace S. now, so none of the new guys tease him about it."

"How…mmf!"

Phases One and Two had gone surprisingly well. If this kept up, Harley mused happily, she might have Sorrow back to her normal self in just a few weeks! With that in mind, she mentally flipped through her plan until she found a likely tactic to try next.

Plans were important. In fact, being a rogue meant spending most of your free time planning. Which theme-related event would have the most cash, or the best opportunity to humiliate the Batman? How many henchmen would be needed to secure the building? And just _how_ were they going to get the eight-foot-tall iron-plated zucchini with optional rocket launchers up twelve flights of stairs? Even if there wasn't a specific target, rogues spent a lot of time in contemplation of the Perfect Heist...or the Perfect Revenge.

Everyone in the gallery had gotten revenge at some point, sometimes even on each other. Whoever said that the best revenge is living well had obviously never considered the possibilities offered by an intricate scheme designed to utterly ruin the target of their righteous anger - or, failing that, a handy tire iron and a henchman built like Andre the Giant.

Even Harley had looked for vengeance - most memorably on the Joker, only a few weeks after she'd first put on a costume for him. She was almost embarrassed to think about it now. Oh, certianly he'd done his share to anger her - he hadn't exactly fired her halfway across town in a rocket with the intent to give her the warm fuzzies - and after she'd dragged herself out of the wreckage she'd sworn to get even. (Well, technically, she'd also tried killing herself first, until Red had kindly reminded her about the joys of revenge.) She'd gotten her revenge...mostly. At the very least, her Puddin' had said that he was sorry, and so everything could be forgiven. (She counted that as a very serious victory indeed. Who else on earth had managed to get the Joker to _apologize_?)

Teng probably wasn't going to apologize. That left Sorrow with one option - delicious, glorious vengeance with no strings attached. She probably just needed a nudge in the right direction to get started. "So, I was thinkin'," Harley said nonchalantly, just quiet enough so that the orderlies outside couldn't hear, "if you wanted to get some of yer own back, I could prob'ly getcha some of Puddin's Smilex. It might be a little hard to get it to him...you know guards, too nosy for their own good," she said, raising her voice enough for the orderlies to hear and develop slight frowns of disapproval. "But maybe prison guards don't care as much."

Sorrow slowly stopped chewing and looked at Harley as if she were a particularly obscure Riddler puzzle. "What?"

"The guards at the prison," Harley repeated. "He's in Blackgate, remember?"

"WHAT?" Sorrow yelped. The forgotten sandwich tumbled apart as she snatched Harley by the front of the shirt. "Say that again," she demanded. The swarm of orderlies outside, noticing her liberated hand, began shoving one another pointedly toward the door of the cell.

"He's in...they didn't tell ya they arrested him?" Harley turned to the orderly who was gingerly attempting to pull her to her feet. "Nice going, jerks," she sniffed.

Sorrow, shoulders jerking as orderlies wrestled her back into position, fought to reach her other wrist. "I'm going to get better and get out of here," she vowed. "And then I'm gonna rip his lungs out!"

"Atta girl!" Harley called encouragingly as she was hustled away.

* * *

Edward and Ivy were waiting impatiently in the rec room. Rather, Eddie was impatient - he'd never done anything like this before, and he was curious about the results - and Ivy was merely eager for Harley's return so she could stop feigning interest in the halfhearted game of poker.

The doors flew open and Harley bounded in. Laceless shoes kicked toward the ceiling as she ducked into a handspring, turned a somersault in midair over the couch, and landed to absolutely no applause in front of Ivy and Edward. "Well if that's how yer gonna be," she sniffed, "I'll take my talents elsewhere." She sniffed haughtily and made to strut away.

Two hands hauled her backward by her collar and she landed on her rear on the table amid a deck of scattered cards. "How'd it go today, Harls?" asked Ivy.

Harley grinned. "I fixed her!"

"That quickly?" Eddie said disbelievingly.

"I'm simply that good," Harley assured him with a superior air and a look of disdain, as if she was Queen of the Universe. With a tilt of her head and an impish grin, she lost all hint of royalty. "Anyway, turns out she was only freaked out 'cuz she thought Teng was gonna come get her again. It took Doc Harley's intervention to make it all betta!" Harley leaned back on her hands, kicking her feet like a little girl. "Maybe I should try gettin' my license back, go back to the therapy gig," she mused.

"I think to keep the license, you'd have to give up the Joker," commented Ivy, watching with amusement.

"Give up Mistah J.? Forget it!"

* * *

Teng was in prison.

Teng was in _prison_! She couldn't believe it. She'd laid there waiting for him to come back, waiting for the final torture to begin while she was weak and basically helpless...and he'd been in _prison_ the whole time! She'd been safe from the very day that she'd been admitted. She'd thrown herself out the window, almost killed herself three times, and spent days in cringing anticipation of his arrival...and he was in _jail._

Sorrow, not for the first time, felt like a complete and total idiot. There had been no reason for any of it! If only she'd watched the news when she was still in her hideout...if only she'd bothered to go outside and pick up the newspaper from the front steps...if only someone had _told her_!

Her blushing, burning feeling of ineptitude started to leak away. No one had told her that she was safe. No one had bothered to let her know that he'd been locked away - and her building anger was almost wiped away by a surge of fierce joy as she imagined Teng in a starchy orange jumpsuit, locked in a cell with nothing but a 300-pound muscly roommate to keep him company. Oh, yes, _that_ was a beautiful image.

A lone orderly waited patiently outside, watching Sorrow as she glared back at him. "Go get me some food," she snapped.

"Gotta wait for the doctor," he said calmly.

"Well, can you at least get this stupid needle out of my foot?"

"Gotta wait for the doctor," he repeated.

Sorrow sighed explosively. "Can you breathe in and out? _Gotta wait for the doctor_," she mocked, yanking irritably at the restraint around her left wrist. The wide leather strap was beginning to rub through the layer of latex that coated the outside of her horrible steel-mesh gloves. On the other hand, the handcuff that secured the glove in place was doing its bit to wear away the edges of the leather, giving it a wonderful peely fringe. Maybe if she kept rubbing them together, she could wear through the strap in another six years or so...

* * *

Dr. Lily Soehnlean was not a particularly strong person. The mysteries of the human mind required time and thought to piece together, and generally she spent her time just sitting and thinking rather than on strenuous physical activities. She was slender and girlish - and coupled with her generally passive personality, one might wonder where she fit in as a doctor to the violently insane.

What most people didn't realize was that weakness could be a weapon. If an inmate didn't have to prove his or her superiority - if they knew, right from the start, that they could take Lily apart in a matter of seconds, and if they knew she knew it too - then they could bypass a lot of the threats and boundary testing that so many of her coworkers had to endure with new patients. People who didn't feel threatened often let their secrets slip. (Of course, doctors who felt constantly threatened often had nervous breakdowns, but that was just one of the many wonderful benefits of working at Arkham.)

Lily generally dealt with henchgirls. Ever since the Batman had first flapped his cape over the city, it seemed that her life had been nothing but a stream of abandoned henchgirls. She'd grown tired of constantly easing them toward sanity only to find that they'd latched on to a different rogue and turned themselves into a new person overnight. If only once they'd latch on to a _doctor_...

But doctors were trouble, all on their own. When Lily had finally acquired a real rogue as a patient, the others had done almost nothing but pester her about the girl. Dr. Tanaka had persuaded her into letting Poison Ivy visit - and that had been a catastrophe, start to finish - and just yesterday Dr. Jackson had browbeaten her into letting Harley Quinn do the same!

_No more_, she vowed, tucking a pen into her clipboard as she strode toward Sorrow's cell. _No more visits, no more _advice_, no more _helpful tips_. From now on, it's just me and her._ An orderly was waiting for her outside the wide plexiglass window. He smiled a relieved little smile and hastened to unlock the door for her.

Something had changed. Instead of laying there, limp and steadfastly looking at the wall, Sorrow was glaring directly at her with a look of pure rage on her face. "Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded as Lily stepped inside.

"Tell you?" Lily asked, baffled.

Sorrow twisted toward Lily, wrenching her left arm backward as the restraint pulled on her wrist. "Why didn't you tell me Teng was in jail?" she growled. If looks could burn, Lily would have been ashes in a fraction of an instant.

"You...you didn't know?" Lily asked tentatively.

"No, I wanted to kill myself for fun. All the cool kids are doing it," Sorrow snapped.

Lily fumbled with her clipboard. "But...but you hadn't been admitted when he was arrested! It was all over the news...we thought you knew," she trailed off.

"Well, now I know, so you can take these stupid straps off."

"I'm afraid I can't do that," Lily said automatically.

Cold blue eyes sparked with rage. "Why not?"

"Well, you...that is...you might hurt yourself," Lily said lamely.

"Like hell I will. I'm through with that."

"Why don't we just wait a bit and see?" Lily said consolingly. "I'm sure that maybe in a little while-"

"In a little while, blah blah, whatever," Sorrow sighed. "Can you at _least_ get that thing out of my foot?"

"You know why you need that," Lily said sternly. "If you're not going to eat - "

"I ate a sandwich three hours ago!" Sorrow protested.

"Really," Lily said flatly.

"Check the crumbs, lady," Sorrow said, gesturing with a jerk of her chin to the spray of breadcrumbs on her blanket. "Better yet, ask your little monkey out in the hallway. He saw it."

Dr. Lily turned to the orderly. "Well?"

"She ate it, all right," he agreed. "Well, after we tied her down again, we hadda feed the rest to her, but she definitely ate it."

Lily nodded and strode to the foot of the gurney. No one told her anything, not even about her own patient! Well, she'd deal with that later. "You know that if you stop eating, the IV goes back in?"

"I know, I know," Sorrow said with the air of a teenager taking last-minute instructions before a date.

Tape parted with skin in one loud, sticky _riiiip_. The orderly handed Lily a cotton ball and a Band-Aid from his belt pouch as she made ready to remove the IV. "Leave this on for a few hours," she instructed as she eased the little plastic tube out of Sorrow's vein, "and then you can take it off."

"Oh, yeah, I'll just bend down there and peel it off with my teeth." Sorrow pointedly rattled her restraints. "Any chance of getting these off sometime in the next millennium?"

Lily balanced on a knife-edge of indecision. If she let her go, and she hurt herself, there went any chance of moving on to rogues and leaving the Land of Whiny Henchgirls behind. On the other hand, if she let her go and she _didn't_ hurt herself...wouldn't that prove her methods had worked? Wouldn't that give her the credit for turning a suicidal person into one that had plans for the future? (The fact that they probably involved hunting down ex-Dr. Teng like a rat in a trap was secondary. Plans meant that she wasn't going to kill herself.) Lily leaned down, looking Sorrow directly in the eyes. "You promise not to hurt yourself?"

"I already did."

"And you promise not to hurt anyone else?"

"Not here," Sorrow said.

"Not anywhere in this building?"

"Nope."

"I'll trust you to stick to your word." Lily bent over Sorrow's lifeless feet and quickly unbuckled the restraints. "Remember, I'm trusting you to do the right thing," she reminded as she reached for Sorrow's right wrist.

Sorrow grinned. "Would I lie to you?" she said innocently.

* * *

There have been many people through the years that have worked their way back from paralysis to full health. There have been tear-soaked, grinning moments when the new walker collapses triumphantly at the end of her five-yard marathon. There have been stoic, determined women with really horrid toes in the back of trucks, commanding their feet to move by the sheer force of their iron will. There have even been occasional miraculous instant cures, when girls who have never walked suddenly leap from their chairs and sprint away from danger.

This particular numb-legged person wasn't really paying attention to her legs. They dangled uselessly over the edge of the bed as she focused intently on her gloves. Would she walk again? Probably. The more she twitched her feet, the more of her legs she was able to feel. If it was only a matter of time, she had better things to worry about.

If she could scrape enough of the latex away enough from the steel mesh, she reasoned, she might be able to touch someone through the gloves. Maybe they'd let her out if she had a hostage. Maybe she could get away with just threatening someone until they got her out...the orderly that Harley had renamed Hot Stuff seemed pretty willing to go along with rogues' demands.

Her nose tingled with a vicious itch. Instinctively, she blew upward, trying to ease it. "What am I doing?" she chuckled, reaching up a newly-freed hand to scratch it. Bliss! Just for good measure, she rubbed over the rest of her face, and the back of her neck as well. Oh, she _needed_ that.

Industriously, she dug the corner of her handcuff back into the center of her other palm. The outer layer of latex obligingly flaked away, exposing a thick, pebbled layer of latex crammed beneath the steel mesh. She glared at it. If she only had a needle, or something else thin, she could poke through it...but armed only with the sawn-apart cuffs, she'd never get through that bottom layer of latex. Well, so much for _that_ plan...

"Hey." An orderly rapped on her window. "You want dinner in here or the cafeteria?"

"Cafeteria," she said instantly. Who cared that she hadn't had a proper shower in weeks? (Bed-baths, she felt, didn't count.) Who cared that she looked like she'd last been used to clean out drains? She'd be getting out of this horrible little room!

The orderly sighed the sigh of those who don't want to bother with doing their job. "Be right back," he muttered. Sorrow took a minute to attempt to flatten the tangled mess that her hair had woven itself into. The orderly came back, pushing a wheelchair in front of him. Instead of his earlier, bored expression, he wore a new look of interest.

Sorrow had no way of knowing it, but this particular orderly was new at Arkham. He'd gone through the traditional training process halfheartedly, not really interested in the minutia of taking care of an endless parade of the warped and weird. No, what he was really interested in was the money.

Orderlies didn't get paid much - by Arkham, that is. A clever orderly could do a favor here, fudge a record there, and make himself a handsome profit for doing very little work. In the few minutes it had taken to fetch the wheelchair (and to sneak a little look at Sorrow's charts), he'd found that she'd been visited by no less than two of Arkham's elite - and two that traditionally were very generous, when it came to favors. Talk about a quick ticket to the top!

So Sorrow was rather surprised when he tossed her a hairbrush and offered to take her to the showers before dinner. Not _ordered_, _offered_ - with an air about him that suggested he was a puppy looking for praise.

"No, thanks," she said carefully, wincing as the hairbrush lodged firmly in a tangle. "Just give me a minute to - _ow_ - to finish this, okay?"

"Whatever you want," he grinned. _Oooo-kay_, she thought, confused. Something was probably up, but since that something apparently involved catering to her every whim, she was willing and ready to let it happen.

When her hair was finally detangled, the orderly retrieved the brush and lifted her gently into the chair, fussing over her as if she was made of spun glass. _I could get used to this_, she thought cheerfully as he wheeled her carefully out into the hallway. Part of her was still on the alert for a trap - she knew she wasn't _that_ safe, after all - but it was nice to not have to worry about things for a few minutes. Mr. Conscientious back there would take care of any trouble.

Her bubble of security lasted just until they entered the lunchroom, where it dissolved instantaneously as the orderly aimed her right toward the center of the room. "Uh, guy?" she asked. "Why are you - _not there_!" she snapped, locking her gloved hands around the wheels as she realized where they were headed.

"Huh?" the orderly asked, obligingly stopping. "I thought you liked Quinn."

Sorrow craned around to glare at him over her shoulder. "I like _Harley_," she informed him icily. "Not, and I want to make this crystal-clear to you..._not_ her boyfriend."

Sure enough, next to Harley, dominating his section of the table, sat the Joker, merrily illustrating some jape or another with a forceful wave of his soup-bowl. A spray of watery tomato soup splashed those nearest to him. No one dared to complain, particularly not Harley, who was now wearing a tomato-soup mask over adoring blue eyes. Apparently his two months in various versions of solitary confinement had done nothing to squelch his sense of humor.

The orderly shrugged and obediently wheeled her down to the far end of the table, where Poison Ivy sat alone, moodily letting a spoonful of soup drizzle down into her bowl. The days of wine and roses - or, more realistically, the days of Harley thinking for herself - were obviously over for now, and Ivy obviously wasn't happy about it.

"Hey," Sorrow said uneasily. "Mind if I join you?" The orderly locked the wheels in place from the back and scurried off to fetch her dinner.

Ivy, without raising her head, flicked suspicious eyes up to regard her through her eyelashes. "Provided you aren't going to attack me again," she said frostily, "you can sit wherever you please."

"I'm sorry about that," Sorrow murmured. "Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?"

"Not at the moment," Ivy muttered.

Another tidal wave of soup crashed down the table. "How about this," Sorrow suggested in a conspiring whisper. "You distract the guards, and I'll go drown him in his soup."

"You can't drown someone with soup they don't have," Ivy pointed out, raising her head a little.

"Your soup, then. Or Harley's -" _Splash_. "Or not."

"I like the way you think," Ivy smiled.

At the other end of the table, the Joker had finished his story. Harley, laughing and applauding enthusiastically, failed to notice as he palmed a slimy piece of bacon out of the green beans. With his other hand, he lightly tossed a large chunk of lettuce from his salad on top of Harley's pigtail. "My little BLT," he smirked.

Lettuce...tomatoes...she frowned. "But Puddin', where's the bacon?"

_Splat!_

She giggled delightedly, totally uncaring that she looked like a victim of an earthquake in a supermarket.

"Say, have you ever..." Bright green eyes tracked an unexpected orderly across the lunchroom, heading toward _his_ table. But the man wasn't going near him - no, he was heading for...

The Joker sucked in a breath of astonished, evil delight. Mmmmmm...the thought of pending vengeance was better than Christmas, even that Christmas where he'd played Bouncing Pedestrians in that SUV with Robin tied up in the passenger seat. She was still _here_!

"Puddin?" Harley asked, noticing the Joker's distraction, and peered across the room to where Ivy and Sorrow sat. "Whatcha thinkin' about?" she asked hesitantly.

"It's that girl," he chuckled quietly. "I'm going to give her the laugh of a lifetime."

Harley, unseen, felt a little shudder of dread quiver her shoulders.

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: This one goes out to my real-life Harley, sammiches and all. Nothing quite says 'you're my pal' like a mouthful of food forcibly shoved into your face! _

_Harley's flirtation with suicide took place in Batman: Harley Quinn. Shocking. Likewise, the walking scenes were lifted from a random Lifetime movie, Kill Bill, and Redwall (hey, Brian Jacques - legs do not work that way!) _

_'Bouncing Pedestrians', of course, is from Detective Comics #826. Now _there's_ a holly, jolly Christmas!_


	3. Best Served Cold

In terms of dread, running from a giant spider seemed almost tame compared to what Sorrow had recently been through. Surely the cringing anticipation of a slow, lingering, torturous death was worse than an enormous arachnid nipping off her head in a few seconds.

In terms of immediate danger, however, Sorrow was fairly certain that she'd take the prospect of death in the future over the slavering spider tracking her through its nest of webs. She was also fairly certain that she was dreaming. (The plaid, syrup-covered rabbits tap-dancing along behind her to the tune of 'In Heaven There Is No Beer' as played by a horde of owls on kazoos was a definite giveaway that this was not reality.)

Knowing that it was a dream didn't make it any less scary, though. When she'd traversed similar nightmare landscapes in the past, it had hurt when the angry weasels had latched onto her face. When the shark had gnawed on her feet, she'd felt each sharp little tooth tear into her skin. The prospect of being some spider's chew toy - and, with her luck, staying alive long enough to feel every stabbing fang - was not appealing.

She hopped through the maze of webbing on the floor, letting her heavy black boots hit the dusty ground only momentarily before finding new footing. The webs glimmered and flashed with every color of the rainbow as the rabbits switched their strobe lights on. From far behind, she could hear the scrape of long, spindly legs against the stone walls as the spider lazily followed her.

The long, narrow room opened up into a huge damp cave. Across the echoing, empty vastness, the floor dropped away beneath a wide swath of webbing that led to a cheerful little door marked "EXIT" in vivid yellow lights. Sorrow gently toed the web with her boot. It wasn't sticky, as the earlier webs had been. The rabbits, maple syrup trailing out of their fur, scampered onto the web and gyrated in a furious reel as the owls honked accompaniment overhead.

Sorrow edged out onto the web, trying hard not to step in syrup, on a rabbit, or into a gap in the webbing. Arms flung wide for balance, she picked her way along, trying hard to ignore the rabbits as they capered around her.

The web twanged discordantly as the spider set foot on it. The owls, sensing that a change of mood was needed, obligingly began squawking out an all-too-cheerful version of the Dance of the Hours. "Not good, not good," Sorrow muttered, darting carefully from web to ropelike web. She chanced a glance over her shoulder.

The spider was accelerating. "Not good!" she whimpered, leaping to the next web. The web, covered in slimy syrup, slipped out from under her boot and snapped hard into her ankle. She went down, flailing wildly, as the spider scuttled up behind her.

The rabbits swarmed over her, coating her in sticky, slippery syrup as they shoved her into position, laying flat on her back under the huge clicky mandibles of the spider. Terrified, reeking of breakfast, and out of options, Sorrow waited to be devoured. A thin black leg reached out and caressed her forehead, brushing a strand of hair away from her face.

She jerked awake, panting with fear. Her muscles locked solidly into place, freezing her as she realized that something was still hovering over her forehead, barely making contact with the hairs on her skin.

"I'm not touching you," a voice crooned out of the darkness. A pale white face suddenly gleamed in the gloom next to her head, teeth bared in a grin.

"Wh-wh-wh…" stammered Sorrow, instinctively drawing the blanket up over herself as if it would provide some defense.

"Surprised to see me, Sorrow? Were you expecting one of your other little friends?" The Joker, dressed for some reason in the dull brown jumpsuit of a janitor, leered at her as he slowly rose to his full height.

There is fear. There is terror. And then there's the bowel-knotting, sweaty-palmed horror of finding a notorious mass murderer - in fact, the _most_ notorious mass murderer in town - lurking quietly by your bedside to take his (admittedly) well-deserved revenge.

With all her heart, Sorrow prayed for the plaid rabbits to come dancing out from under the bed. Even an owl with a broken kazoo would do! Just one little sticky rabbit and this would all be another bad dream...

"Come now, I don't want to have to do all the talking!" he said gaily, flinging his arms wide and spinning to face the opposite wall.

There was a distinct absence of delicious-smelling wildlife prancing on the floor. "Goddamn rabbits," Sorrow muttered.

In a heartbeat, he was back at her side. "Rabbits?" he sneered.

She raised her chin defiantly, hoping he didn't notice her shaking hands clutched tightly around the edge of the blanket. "Rabbits," she said authoritatively. "Rabbits suck."

He chuckled at some private joke and settled himself companionably on her bedside. The rough brown hat, pulled tightly down over his green hair, cast a shadow over his eyes and left nothing but a smile in the moonlight.

_He's sitting on my bed! Of course he's sitting on my bed, he's not scared of me, why would he be scared of me, I can't use my hands and I can't use my legs and I'm going to _die_ - _

There wasn't _time_ to panic. She had maybe five seconds to figure a way out of this.

What did she know about him? Just what she'd heard around town, and that wasn't much. He was impulsive. He was nearly always happy. He liked killing people...like her.

_Focus_. Jokes. Toys. Laughter. Revenge.

Oh, _yes_. That was it!

He beamed at her, happy as a kitten stalking a little toy mouse. "Let's see what Uncle Joker has up his sleeve for the girl, shall we?" he asked. With a flourish of his long, thin fingers, he brandished a switchblade seemingly from nowhere. He studied it carelessly for a second, then flipped the blade up and lightly tossed it to his right hand. "Here's the game. You give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you…or we see just how sharp my little toy really is!" Sharp white teeth flashed in a delighted smile as he waited to deliver the punchline to whatever joke he had brewing in his head.

To his obvious surprise, Sorrow didn't move. She simply watched the knife glinting in the dim light above her with calm acceptance written on her features.

What did the Joker like? Not mere laughter, certainly, because he tended to be the only one to find his little escapades to be amusing. No, what the Joker really liked was _fear_ - that raw, undistilled terror that Crane worked so hard to manufacture with his potions and powders. If murder was the play, then he was the prima donna on center stage, accepting his applause in the form of tearful shrieks and the spray of blood on the wall. He needed to be noticed. He needed to be important. He needed respect, which was in itself only a watered-down version of fear. Sorrow's display of casual patience was to his usual audience what a Bible study was to a mosh pit.

"You're not playing right!" he snapped, temperamentally flinging the knife at the far wall. It clattered off of the cold beige walls and hit the linoleum point-first, stabbing itself into an upright position. Without letting her expression change, Sorrow felt a warm tingle of relief at his reaction. If the knife was over there, he'd have to go retrieve it before he did anything else to her.

It had been easier than she had expected to lay there and wait for the knife to come flashing down. She was beginning to learn that once you've invited Death in - once you've metaphorically hung out the welcome mat and begged him to come around anytime - it can be irritatingly hard to nudge him back out the door. Suicidal thoughts have a tendency to hang around where they're not wanted, drinking your lemonade and putting their grubby feet on the sofa long after you've politely hinted for them to get lost.

The Joker yanked the scruffy hat from his head, sullenly stuffing it in his pocket as he got to his feet. "I go to all this work…y'know how annoying it is to get into another cell? I had to kill four janitors before I found one with a key! And now you won't even play right."

"Why should I?" Sorrow inquired flatly.

"You ruined me!" he growled, running an angry hand through his hair. "They put me..._me_! on a suicide watch for three weeks! The least you could do is to play along with a smile on your face," he added petulantly.

"A _smile?_" Sorrow rolled her eyes. "I guess you didn't hear what went on while you were away. I'm not going to play your little game, Joker," she continued, pretending that she hadn't seen a single green eyebrow arch with curiosity. "Either kill me or let me get back to sleep."

The Joker scooped the knife from the floor with one fluid movement and padded back toward her, tapping the shining metal of the blade on his lips. (The handle, Sorrow noticed uneasily, was far more red than an average switchblade. Come to think of it, she hadn't ever remembered the janitors having red polka-dots over the fronts of their uniforms, either...) "What could have possibly happened while I was..._away_?" he mimicked softly.

"Dr. Teng started experimenting on me with your Smilex," she said emotionlessly.

"He didn't," the Joker denied.

"He did," Sorrow replied.

Possessive anger flashed in the Joker's eyes. "He _didn't_," he repeated, laying the knife across her throat as if he could force her to blurt out a truth that didn't exist.

"He _did_." _Duck season. Wabbit season. Oh, please let this work_...Sorrow thought. Smilex was _his_, and if there was one thing the Joker hadn't learned in kindergarten, it was how to share.

"Prove it," he snapped. The cold metal of the knife bit lightly into her skin as Sorrow obligingly rolled the sleeve of her uniform up, exposing the myriad dots lurking in the crook of her elbow from Teng's many visits. He glared at them as if personally offended - which, she thought, hopefully he was. "Smilex is lethal," he pointed out through gritted teeth.

Sorrow cocked her head. "I guess he found a way to change that, didn't he?" Maybe he had. Maybe he really had taken some of Joker's toxins and mucked about with them. Or maybe Teng had been telling the truth, and he'd come up with his own brand of chemical evil all by himself.

Did it really matter? The important issue now was getting this knife off of her trachea.

The Joker's eyes were narrowed with the kind of expression she'd only seen previously on rabid St. Bernards. She could almost see him considering his two options: kill her now, when she would just passively let him, or wait until it was funny. Frankly, she didn't care. If he wanted to attack her in the future, that was fine with her. Hopefully, he'd have the courtesy (or bad luck) to wait until she'd pried the gloves off and relearned how to walk...

Abruptly, with a stifled chuckle, he snapped the knife closed and stowed it away. "I'll deal with _you_ later," he promised. "First...I have to make a little house call." He jammed the hat back down over his hair and theatrically closed her door, slowly enough to prevent the locks from clicking any louder than a breath. Then, loudly whistling the Looney Tunes theme, he skipped off down the hallway.

Sorrow waited until she heard a distant, squelchy yelp that indicated that the Joker had relieved another guard of his worries about tomorrow. When she was sure that he'd left the building, she slowly curled back into a sleeping position and shut her eyes tight. _Bunnies_, she thought. _A nice dream about bunnies, with no chasing and no syrup and definitely no spiders. Cute, cuddly bunnies..._She slowly drifted off to sleep.

When the alarms went off approximately two hours later, she was actually rather relieved to be jolted awake. Bunnies weren't supposed to have scorpion tails, and they definitely weren't supposed to have big shiny claws.

* * *

The population of Arkham was always rather tense the morning after an escape. Depending on the ex-inmate in question, the doctors had different concerns. _How did they get out_? was always at the top of the list, generally followed by _Are they in danger? _for the lower-priority prisoners and _Am _I_ in danger?_ for the high-priority.

How the Joker had gotten out was easy enough. Four janitors (one missing his jumpsuit), three guards, and one incredibly stupid orderly were discovered in various corners of the asylum with large, goofy red grins carved deeply into their cheeks. (The orderly in question had forgotten to remove his switchblade from his back pocket before coming to work, a mistake he most assuredly would never make again.) A further orderly was found quivering in a closet in the staff room, clutching three deep wounds in her abdomen that vaguely resembled a happy, smiling face.

The staff despaired at ever keeping the Joker inside. The ancient locks coupled with the security cameras' bad wiring and the increasingly difficult task of keeping staff longer than a few weeks added up to an escape that he probably could have performed blindfolded.

Contrary to what most people might suspect, though, life at the asylum the next day remained as usual. (Well, perhaps the sight of janitors scrubbing bits of their coworkers off of the walls was a tad out of the ordinary...) The morning began as all mornings did at Arkham - with the inmates being gently hustled off to the cafeteria for breakfast.

Sorrow and Poison Ivy were delighted to welcome Harley Quinn back to their end of the table. Harley was alternately beaming over the wondrous escape her Puddin' had pulled off and sighing into her cereal because she hadn't gotten to go with him. To distract her, Ivy had launched into a re-telling of her top ten Batman stories. Sorrow sighed and rubbed the scratch the Joker had left on her neck as Ivy paused in the middle of number four to take a ladylike sip of water.

"So anyway, I had Batman trapped in the…what's that on your neck?" Ivy interrupted herself to ask Sorrow.

"Nothing," said Sorrow, feigning intense interest in the brownish half-apple that rested on her tray.

"C'mon, S, what's on yer neck?" asked Harley.

"It's…" She glanced at Harley and looked away. "It's just a scratch."

* * *

The rec room hummed with the quiet transfer of gossip. Asylum gossip, which always tended to be violent, embarrassing, or both at once, was fully concentrated on the Joker's escape. Harley Quinn, as the official expert on the Joker, was besieged with questions from all sides. "Is it true that he killed seventeen guys last night?" a youngish man called, waving his hand as if he was in school.

"No, only eight," Harley said with a touch of regret in her voice.

"Is it true that he almost gutted Carlson on the way out?"

"No, Carlson wasn't here," Harley said, with perhaps a little more regret in her voice. The inmates clustered around her sighed with disappointment. If the Joker had managed to dispatch Dr. Carlson, the head of the asylum, that would have meant general chaos - chaos which would have greatly boosted their own chances for escape.

"You may tell him that the king is grateful for his actions against the encroaching Nazis," a voice squeaked. The crowd gently parted, looking curiously over their shoulders, at a scrawny, spindly man in what he obviously felt was a regal posture.

"And you are?" Harley asked calmly.

"I am Yod, the thirteenth king of Israel." He paused to let the others bask in his presence. "You may bow," he added pointedly.

"Sure thing, yer Majesty," Harley said, tipping her head politely in his direction. The others, with subtle snickers, followed suit. The king, pleased with the response, turned on his heel and strode away, calling for his soldiers. "So anyway, who's next?"

"Did he really - " "Is it true that - " "I heard that he - "

From the corner, Poison Ivy and Sorrow watched the group of attention-starved inmates vying to get their questions answered first. "How long has the "king of Israel" been here?" Sorrow asked.

"Which one?" Ivy snorted. "There's at least three in here at the moment." Ivy's gaze flicked to just below Sorrow's chin. "Would you like to tell me what really happened to your neck?" she asked, in a tone more reminiscent of the phrase 'you _would_ like to tell me'.

Sorrow studied Harley for a moment, surrounded by her bevy of inquiring inmates. "Well, you know how it goes," she said lightly. "Put the Joker on suicide watch for two miserable little weeks and suddenly he's all twitchy about it."

"He tried to kill you?" Ivy said doubtfully.

"Well, yeah," Sorrow shrugged.

"And you're still alive," Ivy continued disbelievingly. "Right. Why on earth would he let you live?"

"I gave him a better target," Sorrow explained. "I told him that Teng had - "

"You're going to let him kill _Teng_?" Ivy interrupted, horrified.

"Yeah. Well, no, I mean...what's the big deal?"

"You're going to let someone else kill Teng," Ivy said, stunned. "You don't want to do it yourself, and you're just going to _let_ him-"

"Hold on a minute! Who said he'd actually do it?" Sorrow snapped. "Teng's in Blackgate, right? There's no way the Joker could get to him!" She paused. "He _better_ not kill him," she muttered, playing with the little link of chain dangling from one wrist.

"You!" Sorrow and Ivy looked up at a doctor cuddling a clipboard close to his chest. "Dr. Carlson wants to see you. Now." Fumbling with the clipboard, he grabbed the handles on Sorrow's chair and shoved her toward the door.

* * *

Dr. Carlson's office was located in the center of the block that housed the rogues' psychiatrists. As the nervous doctor pushed her in, unannounced, Carlson was shouting into the telephone.

"…and we have to find out where he's gotten to! He's even more unstable nowadays!...A car, blue, convertible…I don't know! The one he stole it from can't remember her license plate number!...because she's in the hospital, that's why!...fine, fine, I'll call you back." He hung up the phone and turned to Sorrow. "Where's the Joker?" he demanded.

"How should I know?"

Carlson indicated a small television monitor on the wall. Through the fizzing static, she could barely make out a brown-clad figure sneaking down a hallway and letting himself into...she squinted...into her cell. "Where. Is. The Joker?" he growled.

Part of her wanted to tell him - at least, to tell him where she thought he'd eventually be going. They had to keep the Joker away from Teng! Teng was _hers_ to kill. The other part of her - the part that knew the unwritten rules of prison society - was waving a big red flag and indicating that if she told him, she'd be a snitch. Snitches tended to die - painfully - and Sorrow wasn't ready to go yet. She had things to do! People to rob! Overbearing ex-psychiatrists to kill!

Sorrow blinked wide, innocent eyes at the doctor. "I don't know," she lied.

"You don't know," Carlson said flatly. "Fine." He gestured at the tape, where the little Joker had just extracted the knife from his sleeve. "Do you know what he's doing there?"

Sorrow shrugged. The video screen fizzed with static, covering the action. An irritated sigh burst from Carlson as he fast-forwarded to the next bit of clear screen. They were just able to see Sorrow laying on her bed, one sleeve rolled up, while the Joker pressed his knife meaningfully to her neck.

"What was he saying to you?" Carlson demanded. "What did he _want_?"

Sorrow shrugged again.

Carlson smacked the power button and the screen faded to black. "Roll up your sleeve," he ordered. "The right one," he added as Sorrow began rolling up the sleeve on the arm the Joker hadn't looked at. He squinted carefully at the tiny constellation of needle scars on her inner elbow. "Injections," he muttered. "He left after you showed him...why would he care about..." His eyes widened. "Teng," he said firmly. "Teng did that to you."

"I don't want to talk about that," Sorrow muttered.

"You're not exactly a talker, are you?" Carlson said, jamming his hands into his jacket pockets as he leaned against his desk. "You showed him what Teng did and he left..." He frowned in deep thought, slowly assembling the puzzle in his head.

The last piece clicked into place. "He's going after Teng, isn't he?" he yelped, leaping upright. Sorrow, unable to keep her entire reaction hidden, felt her face twitch with recognition. "You told him that Teng used his...his..." He flapped a hand, not remembering the name of the Joker's particular brand of joy juice. "His stuff, and now he's going to go after him!" He scanned her face, reading in her silence his answer. "Torres!" he snapped.

The nervous doctor hovering behind Sorrow jerked with surprise. His clipboard fell, smacking Sorrow in the head on its way to the ground. "Hey!" she protested.

"Sorry, sorry," he muttered, scooping up fallen papers and fumbling them into a rough stack.

"Torres, take her back." As Dr. Torres clumsily maneuvered Sorrow out of the door, she heard Carlson frantically punching buttons on the phone. "Get me Blackgate Penitentiary," he demanded.

* * *

Breaking out of jail was easy. The Joker was an old hand at that. Given the right circumstances, he was confident that he could break out of any facility anywhere in the world.

Breaking _into_ jail, however, was another thing entirely. It was a hassle to sneak in - he'd have to smuggle in his weapons and paint his skin beige and do a hundred and a half more things that he simply didn't have the patience for - and it was even more of a hassle to try and find a bribable guard. It was made worse by the flood of new faces inside the prison, hired on specifically to catch him if he tried to sneak inside.

If they weren't going to let him sneak in, there was really only one option left - and luckily, it was the option that he loved most. He would show the world what happened when you touched the Joker's toys!

The Joker had access to possibly the largest supply of explosives, weaponry, and henchmen within the Gotham area. Working for the Riddler might pay the bills, and working for Catwoman might net you some envious stares, but working for the Joker - and surviving - gave an ambitious henchman the kind of street cred that he'd need to start his own gang someday. Everyone wanted to work for the Clown Prince of Crime.

In the four days that had passed since his escape, things at the prison had relaxed slightly. The SWAT teams had been called away to deal with a massive drug bust across town, and so the formerly jam-packed towers had opened their windows to let the stench of sweaty kevlar and oiled metal out. The remaining guards clutched their rifles tightly and murmured to one another in low tones that surely he wouldn't come tonight. It was already three in the morning - far too late to start any kind of shenanigans.

_Thwupthwupthwup_. As one, the guards ran to the windows and thrust their upper bodies out, aiming the rifles at the moving smudge in the still, cool darkness. Two of them, thinking quickly, darted to the searchlights and kicked them on, manhandling them around until they pointed at the intruder.

A 48-foot-long shipping container, painted brightly with balloons and polka dots, thumped down in the sick, brownish grass of the yard. As the prison guards stared in shock, the ends of the container burst outward in a puff of bright green smoke. A crowd of men in clown masks streamed out, bearing an assortment of weapons that would have made any war buff's fingers itch. They flooded out, an impossibly huge army, seeking out guards and taking them down by the sheer force of their numbers.

As the battle began to heat up, an oversized purple helicopter descended into the yard. The Joker stepped lightly out of the back of the copter and sauntered through the halls, allowing his handpicked swarm of burly henchmen to blow open doors and blow apart the occasional guard. He strolled down the dirty wire of the walkways, nodding regally to certain familiar faces as he passed.

Teng's cell, which had been heavily guarded for days now, bristled with men in black bulletproof vests and gas masks. The Joker, with a lazy wave of one gloved hand, sent his minions crashing into them. While everyone was occupied with their fight, he let himself into Teng's cell with some minor explosives.

Prison hadn't been good to Reginald Teng. Being told that the Joker was out for blood - _his_ blood - hadn't been especially good for him either. The frightened, sweaty ex-doctor was huddled behind his bunk bed, whimpering useless pleas for help.

The Joker calmly raised a revolver, aiming it neatly between Teng's eyes. "I never did like you," he mused. "Say goodnight, GracieeEEEEEE!" Teng ducked as the Joker staggered toward him with what looked like one of Hell's own demons clinging to his back. The figure slammed the clown to the floor on his stomach and brought a heavy boot down on his wrist.

"Batman!" Teng gasped.

The Joker, used to such treatment, eeled free and popped a knife out of his sleeve. "_Batman_!" he gasped, scrambling to his feet. "Slooooowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch -"

Batman, ignoring his words, snatched his knife hand and sent him tumbling toward the farthest wall.

"Wise guy, eh?" Joker whined, lurching upright. "An' I grabbed him! An' I popped him!" Matching actions with words, he snatched Batman by the cape on his neck and punched him squarely in the face. Batman allowed the punch to send him backward, using the momentum to crack the Joker's jaw with the heel of his boot.

"An' I ripped his shhhirt," the Joker slurred through a split lip. "An' I-" A backhand fist cannoned into his face.

Teng, meanwhile, had edged carefully around the fight and ducked out into the corridor. Clowns fighting guards packed the narrow hallway, cursing and threatening each other in voices edged with terror and rage. Panting with fear, trying to ignore the heavy scent of blood, he scrambled past the carnage and peeked around the corner. Clowns and guards wrestled for dominance as far as the eye could see.

The explosions had ripped holes into the wall. Teng seized a fallen guard by the foot and dragged him into the nearest one. The man that emerged after two minutes of furious activity was definitely a cop. He had the right uniform, the right gleam in his eyes, and the right sense of utter superiority when surrounded with the scum of Gotham. Rather than leaping into the fray, though, he bolted for the front gates.

"I need backup!" a cop surrounded by clowns screamed as he saw the black blur of Teng hurtling by.

"I saw the Joker go this way!" Teng lied, ignoring the cop's howls of pain as he thundered away. He raced for the entrance, wheezing, and used the guard's key to let himself out.

* * *

The papers the next day were plastered with stories of the Joker's intrusion. Color pictures dominated the front page, showing the smoking remains of doors, the crowd of grim, handcuffed clowns, and the occasional lime-green stain of laughing gas on cold concrete walls.

There were procedures at Arkham for mornings like this. Arkham's residents tended to view news of trouble at other prisons as a standing invitation to raise some hell in their own barred landscape. The staff, not looking forward to Round 534 of the Feast of Fools, instantly squashed any contact the inmates had with the outside world. Incoming mail - all of it - was 'misplaced' until the staff could ensure that no news of the Joker's nighttime activities had gotten through. Televisions in the rec rooms were immediately unplugged. Certainly the inmates would suspect that something was up - in fact, rarely an hour went by _without_ someone accusing the staff of conspiring against them - but since media blackouts tended to happen in a variety of situations, the inmates would be left guessing as to what actually happened.

The Joker himself wouldn't be telling anyone, either. Batman had personally delivered his unconscious burden of clown to Arkham, where he was immediately stuffed into solitary in the most secluded cell they could find. Once the furor over the Joker's latest escapade had died down, they'd consider moving him back to his old cell - presuming, of course, that they managed to figure out how he'd gotten out of it in the first place.

The result of all this rampant censorship was this: they had done their job too well. No-one found out about the Joker's intrusion into Blackgate Penitentiary until a few weeks later, when the news was sufficiently old enough to curtail anyone's thoughts of joining in the fun. On the other hand, no-one whatsoever inside of Arkham found out about Teng's surreptitious exit from his cell - and that included Sorrow.

* * *

Time dragged on inside the slowly warming cells of Arkham. In one of their typical tricks, the staff neglected to turn the air conditioning up as the hot July sun beat down on the dark building. Though the sun had set hours ago, the heat remained, trapped inside like an erring citizen, and the inmates sprawled in limp puddles of sweat on their beds as they hoped to catch the feeble gusts of cold air puffing from the slitted vents in each ceiling.

With gritted teeth, Sorrow shoved herself up from her bunk and lurched across the room. The sweat of overheated exertion soaked her jumpsuit and persistently rolled directly into her eyes. Muttering curses, swiping once again at her long hair and wishing desperately for a hairtie, Sorrow staggered onward.

From the moment that she'd learned of Teng's arrest, she'd begun working toward gaining her mobility again. It hadn't been easy. She was beginning to think that nothing would ever be _easy_.

To begin with, it had been painful. She had expected to be weak as she re-built her muscles, and she had expected problems as she tried to walk on partly-numb feet. What she hadn't expected were the fiery, stabbing pains that accompanied each footstep as her nerve endings burst back into life.

But then, life in Arkham was full of surprises. She'd been equally surprised to hear that both Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were due for an early release. Harley had gleefully explained to her that since she and Ivy had taken an interest in her welfare ('Cuz of that time we sprung ya!') their respective psychiatrists had, in turn, taken an interest in theirs. They had decided that the best way to encourage this new trend was to reward them with some time outside of the asylum, in the nearby halfway house. That had been the last she'd heard of them.

She almost wished it was the last she'd heard _about_ them. When he'd heard the news, the Riddler had nearly snapped his charcoal stick in half. "But I was there too!" he protested. "I was the one who picked the goddamn locks! Without me, you'd still be stuck here! **A drenched slopping sum**!"

His complaints extended through the rest of the afternoon and the rest of the week, growing louder and louder as his indignation at being left out inflated to massive proportions. Finally, reasoning that nothing _too_ terrible would come of it, the psychiatrists of Arkham unceremoniously shoved Edward Nygma into the first empty room available in the halfway house, where he promptly vanished into the depths of Gotham's underworld.

Sorrow stumbled back to her bed and flopped gratefully down on the rough cotton blanket, panting with effort. She'd managed to get around the room three full times - a new record - and she was certain that if she kept working at it, she'd be up and running in the next week or so.

"Meds." She slitted an eye open to see an orderly standing by her bedside.

"I don't take any." In fact, the doctors had adamantly refused to give her anything, even Tylenol for an occasional headache, on the grounds that it could react to the remnants of whatever toxins there were lurking in her bloodstream.

The orderly shrugged. "The doc says you gotta take 'em." Sorrow regarded the little paper cup of pills suspiciously. "Got a glass of water for ya, too," the orderly added, nodding to his other hand.

For a drink of ice water, Sorrow would willingly try to swallow an elephant. She gulped the pills down and grinned as the near-frozen liquid chilled her all the way down. The orderly smiled, taking the paper cups, and slipped out of her cell.

* * *

A harsh light on her face woke her up. She moaned and tried to throw her arm over her eyes to block it out, but her arm wouldn't move. She came fully awake in that instant and pulled insistently on her arm. Her wrist complained as a stiff leather restraint bit into it, sending the steel-mesh gloves scraping harshly over her skin. Her other wrist was similarly restrained, as well as both ankles. Whoever had tied her up had certainly wanted to make a full job of it, since there was even a set of straps holding down her chest, abdomen, and thighs.

Panic exploded inside her head. She knew that whoever had put her in these restraints obviously had no plans to let her go any time soon, but she couldn't help rattling them against the bed and calling frantically to anyone in earshot to let her go. She hadn't done anything! What was going on? After a few minutes, she forced herself to calm down and look around.

She was in a lab, or a testing room, or something. Cold air blasted out of the registers above her, sending goosebumps prickling over her skin. She was right next to a rack of test tubes, carefully labeled in tiny handwriting. She squinted at the tubes, but the writing was too indistinct to make out. The bed was near a sink. Above the sink was a cabinet, and on the other side of the room was a camera, lens aimed at her. She stuck her tongue out at it. There were closets over there as well, two of them, and a lab table with some odd-looking equipment on it…

The door opened and a man in green scrubs - the orderly who had given her her night meds - came in. He looked at her, nodded and walked behind the rack of test tubes. The door swung open again and a gaunt Asian man with long hair and glasses walked in, brandishing a clipboard.

"And how are we today, my dear?" A slow, devilish grin lazed across his face.

Sorrow's eyes widened in total terror. "You're…you're _not…_"

"I see you don't recognize me! The Blackgate Miracle Diet and a few missed trips to the barber, and I'm a whole new person!" Teng beamed at her like a child with a new toy.

"What the hell are _you_ doing here?" she screeched. He was supposed to be in jail! She was supposed to be safe!

"Ah, but where is here?" he grinned, while moving toward the sink. He washed his hands as he continued speaking. "You see, you're not where you think you are. I took the liberty of borrowing you from the asylum so we could finish our little experiment, dear. Naturally I couldn't have any of those know-nothings at Arkham involved in our fun!" A small frown crossed his face. "Of course, they took my notes...but no matter, we can always start again!" He spun around and flung up an arm dramatically, catching the knob of the cabinet above the sink and throwing the door open. The cabinet was full of syringes in neatly labeled boxes.

A scream built up in the back of Sorrow's throat. Teng grinned, taking a test tube from the man in green and fitting the syringe into it. He deftly inserted the needle into her arm, admonishing her to not be such a baby about it, and stood back to watch.

It was worse this time. Whatever he'd done to it, he'd made it worse…the room was shrinking, closing in, and she howled in fear.

Then everything started to dance. Teng's eyebrows grew top hats and started to mambo across his face. The test tubes waltzed around and around with each other in the rack, and the cabinet doors pivoted back and forth in a cheerful swaying groove. Teng leaned down to her and she thought he may have tried to threaten her, but it came out as a joke, the funniest thing in the world, and she laughed and laughed and laughed…

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: Thanks to the Three Stooges. NIAGARA FALLS! RIVERS OF BLOOD! Also thanks to Hans Christian Andersen, whose 'Little Mermaid' obviously left a lasting mark in my childhood brain. _


	4. Hide and Seek

_Hey, folks! This seems like a good time to remind you that this story takes place in the canon of the late 1980's...with certain exceptions. This means that Babs is Batgirl, Dick's just starting out as Nightwing, and Tim's the brand-new Robin - and that a lot of the references and certain jestery sidekicks have been transplanted into the past. (When the nearest comic book store is an hour and a half away, and DC insists on changing the Bat-roster every two minutes (he's dead! he's alive! she's dead! she's alive! the villains are heroes! the heroes are villains!), it's just easier to deal with things as they generally stood twenty years ago.)_

* * *

Arkham Asylum had a visitor's area. This surprised most people. Who would willingly go visit _anyone_ living inside Arkham? For that matter, who would willingly go into Arkham anyway? But regulations demanded that visitors be allowed, even if it was just a reporter or a cop gathering evidence. On the rare occasions when a true social call was on the books, the visitors were shown into a grungy little set of rooms split in two by plexiglass and allowed fifty minutes of quality bonding time with whatever psychopath they'd come to see.

This particular visitor was humming happily to herself as she approached the bored orderly manning the reception desk. Without looking up from her magazine, she gestured to the sign-in book that lay open and empty in front of her. The visitor, still cheerfully humming, picked up the pen and studied the blank line thoughtfully.

_Harley Quinn_, she signed. No, something about that wasn't right...Oh! The psychiatrists would get all upset if they knew she was signing things like that. She hurriedly crossed it out and scrawled _Harleen Quinzel. _There was no need to give the shrinks any reason to toss her back into her cell any sooner than they had to! Besides, she had plans to carry out - most of them revolving around springing the Joker as soon as possible - and she was enjoying her little vacation, such as it was.

When she'd been delivered to the halfway house like an unwanted pizza, she had waited until night had fallen before sneaking back home. It should have been full of henchmen caring for the hyenas, making sure the place was clean, and possibly working on assembling another one of Puddin's joke devices. Instead, the place was empty - well, empty except for two very, very hungry hyenas. Harley dragged a huge bag of kibble over to their yard and tore it open with one judicious kick from a sharp high heel. With the babies fed, she looked for clues as to their next whereabouts. Sure, Puddin' had left her alone like this before...but he was in Arkham. Why weren't any of the boys here?

She found her answer in the stack of hastily scribbled plans on the Joker's desk. The boys weren't here because the boys were in jail. She blew an impressed sigh as she scanned the scribbly, excited writing. He really must have been mad to waste all those guys like that! Trust her Puddin' to make his point in the most attention-grabbing way possible, even if it did mean using up at least half of Gotham's floating collection of henchmen.

The final page - a photo of Teng, mustachioed, monocled, and with several bleeding wounds surrounding a big red markered smile - told her what his goal had been. Instantly, her thoughts flashed to Sorrow. If Puddin' had killed the doc, Sorrow deserved to know. In the interests of keeping busy (and in the interests of living Bat-free until Mr. J's departure from Arkham) she returned to the halfway house.

No one at the halfway house was particularly eager to tell her about the Joker's latest exploits. They'd all been warned repeatedly that any talk of the Joker would pull Harley back into obsession. Finally, disgusted, she'd trotted off to the library and looked up the newspaper articles for herself.

He hadn't managed to kill Teng. Harley, with mixed loyalties, considered the matter for a minute and shrugged philosophically. Well, someone would kill him sooner or later. As long as he was still in prison...

_ESCAPE FROM BLACKGATE PEN! _the next headline crowed. Oooo, _this_ wasn't good. Harley flicked through the article, raced outside, and hailed the next cab. If Sorrow didn't know already (and she probably didn't, knowing the jerks who worked there), someone should tell her. And Harley, with her love of gossip, was just the one to do it.

She laid the pen down on the book with an audible _thwap_. The orderly, still engrossed in her article, pulled the log book back underneath the bulletproof glass and glanced at the name. "Oh!" she gasped, dropping the magazine on the floor. "Um, hi, Miss Quinn...zel. Quinzel." Harley favored her with a sunny smile. "I'll just, um...who did you want to see?" she asked desperately. "I thought Poiso-Miss Isley was released when you were!"

"I wanna see Sorrow."

"Sara?" the woman asked, puzzled. "Sara who?"

"_Sorrow_," Harley said patiently. "She's up on four, next to Crane."

The orderly, hands shaking ever so slightly, typed in a schedule request for Sorrow on her keyboard. The fourth floor was where the rogues were kept. As the one in charge of visitors, she'd be the one to trot upstairs and haul down the inmate in question - and nothing said "bad day" like escorting a rogue to and from a social call. They tended to get..._upset_ rather easily.

The computer pinged warningly. "Um..." the orderly muttered, tapping in another request. "Oh."

"What?"

"She's not here."

"Whaddaya mean, _not here_?" Harley asked. "They didn't let her out too, did they?" If they had, why hadn't she seen her at the halfway house?

Patient confidentiality laws said very clearly that any information about patients was to be given to only the patient or the patient's legal guardian. Patient confidentiality laws, in this case, could take a long walk off a short pier, since being fined or fired was a hell of a lot better than being laughing-gassed to death. "Well, according to the logs, she had some kind of seizure and the doctor on call sent her over to Gotham General. She's been there for almost a week."

Well, fine. She'd just go _there_ and tell her. The orderly, obviously wanting to make up for her earlier slight, called Harley a cab and offered to pay for it herself. Since Harley wasn't exactly able to hit an ATM (in either sense of the word), she agreed.

When she got to the hospital, she skipped in the doors at full speed and bypassed the line at the reception desk. The receptionist behind the desk distractedly waved the blonde to a seat, pointing at the line that stretched down the hall like an angry, fearful centipede. Harley rolled her eyes. She didn't _do_ lines. With a toss of her pigtails, she clicked off down the hallway to find someone more cooperative.

Sorrow would probably be in either the neurology department or the psych ward. Harley wound through the halls until she spotted a nurse's station staffed by an old friend. "Hey! Jake!" she called, wriggling her fingers in a cheerful wave.

Jacob looked up from his stack of paperwork and blanched at the sight of Harley Quinn beckoning merrily at him. He glanced behind him, as if to confirm that Harley wasn't beckoning some _other_ Jake who used to work the rogues' wing in Arkham, and uneasily approached her.

"Hey there…" he said, at a loss for words.

"Hiya! Hey, don't worry, I'm on my Get Out of Jail Free card this time, Jake!" She dug in her purse and held up her 'Legally Sane' certificate. (It wasn't really current - in fact, it had been revoked years ago - but he didn't need to know that.)

He nodded and smiled carefully. "So what brings you here, Harley?"

"Well, I've got a pal in here somewhere, name of Sorrow."

Jake retreated to the safety of the station, where he flipped through a stack of patient charts. "Sorry, Harley, there's no one named Sorrow here."

"Maybe she's in another ward," Harley suggested.

The nurse obligingly typed in her name and waited for the computer to spit back a result. "She's not here," Jake said. "Are you sure she's at _this_ hospital? Shouldn't she be inside Arkham?"

Harley stared at him. She knew he wouldn't lie to her, just as she knew the orderly at Arkham wouldn't lie to her. They knew better.

Where was Sorrow?

* * *

Harley kicked her high heels across the room in frustration. The red one hit the wall near the TV, and the black one bounced off of the dreary little landscape hanging on the kitchen wall. She sank down into the uncomfortable standard-issue beige armchair and swung her legs over the right arm of it, resting her head on her hand and scowling at the blank screen of the television.

Harley Quinn was more tenacious than most people gave her credit for. It took a lot of willpower (and maybe just a soupçon of raving insanity) to survive as the Joker's henchwench. But even before that, she'd bulled her way through medical school and gymnastics training, working and working every minute to get what she wanted.

What she wanted now was to know where Sorrow was. People didn't just _disappear_ out of Arkham, not without a flashy breakout or a body bag. After half a dozen phone calls and a lot of eye-rolling at answering machines ("_I sent a message to the fish: I told them "This is what I wish." The little fishes of the sea, They sent an answer back to me._" was Jervis' latest attempt at an understandable greeting) Harley had decided that a more personal touch was required.

She'd searched the whole city, trying everywhere she could think of that Sorrow would have been (legally or not). Arkham was clueless, the hospitals had never heard of her, she wasn't at any of her old hideouts (Harley had even tried to pry up floorboards and look behind walls, just in case, and had almost fallen through the hole in the roof in the warehouse down by the docks when her heels slipped on the rotting shingles), she wasn't at any of Ivy or Harley or Eddie's old hideouts, or any of the other rogues' hideouts that she knew of, even though she'd never mentioned knowing any of them…She wasn't in a hotel, she wasn't in a bar, she wasn't at the Iceberg, she wasn't _anywhere._

Harley peevishly picked up the battered remote control and flicked the television on. _Boring, boring...oooooh!_ She perked up as the screen filled with the Joker's face. Oh, it was just that stupid documentary again, the one they kept playing because the man in charge had suffered a mysterious accident involving a piano and a 'faulty' pulley fifty feet above his head. Harley halfheartedly threw the remote at the TV. It clattered to the floor, barely making an audible _ping_ as it connected with the screen.

The window slid open by itself with a tortured squeal of rusty metal. Logically, it could be anyone out there - ninjas, invisible men, killer teddy bears (a tactic that Clayface had used to scare quite a few people out of their homes so he could rob them in peace) - and she was almost happy to see that it was just Batman's brats out on the town. "Y'know, breaking and entering's a crime," she commented, wriggling her toes. "I could call the cops on ya."

"Funny, Harley." Nightwing glanced to the window, where Batgirl was easing herself over a jagged protrusion of broken siding. Once she was inside, she glared at Harley, trying to mimic the Batman's best _I'm-going-to-introduce-your-feet-to-your-colon_ stare. Nightwing, beside her, had obviously decided to aim for _It's-all-fun-and-games-until-someone-loses-an-eye-and-it's-not-gonna-be-me_. It was cute, in a way, like being menaced by two chihuahuas who had once seen a Rottweiler. (Ever since her average romantic evening had developed a serious risk of ending by being grabbed by the pigtails and chucked out a window, the thought of being lightly pummeled by the baby Bats no longer frightened Harley in the slightest.) To fully illustrate her total disinterest in them, Harley casually shifted position in the armchair until her head dangled toward the ground and her red-and-black painted toes pointed toward the corroded old ceiling lamp. "Couldja move? This is the good bit," she said, pointing at the Joker's wild rampage on the TV screen.

Without looking, Nightwing slammed his heel into the power button. "Where is she?" he asked gruffly.

"Who, Red? Prob'ly at a greenhouse…why? Need a coupla flowers for someone?" Harley grinned evilly at him, tilting her head at Batgirl. "Do I detect a hint of a blush?"

"Sorrow, Harley! Where is she?" snapped Batgirl.

Harley shrugged, an interesting maneuver since she was flopped upside down in an armchair, and said "Search me, toots."

The two vigilantes reached out in unison and hauled Harley upright, tossing her back in the chair in a normal seated position. "Where is she?" asked Nightwing again. What little patience the Bats ever displayed was clearly wearing thin.

"Why d'ya think I know, huh?" Harley retorted, folding her arms defiantly.

"You went to see her today," Batgirl said, hand brushing the top of a batarang in her belt.

Harley rolled her eyes. "I _tried_ ta go see her. She wasn't there."

"She wasn't there?" Batgirl sneered. "That's the best you can do?"

"She was gone before I got there. Nice to know I've got someone keepin' an eye on me," she smirked as she pointedly flicked a piece of lint from her sleeve.

Nightwing and Batgirl exchanged a glance, then headed for the window.

"What, no goodbye kiss?" Harley called after them as they swung away. She slammed the window, locking it securely, then paced back to her armchair and flopped down sideways in it.

Even the Bats didn't know where she was. This was getting serious.

She ferreted around in her smiley-face purse for a moment, extracting a vivid red-and-black checkerboarded cell phone, and hit the speed-dial. Ivy hadn't been in any of her lairs today, but hopefully she'd answer her cell...

"Hey Red! Got a question for ya…seen Sorrow around recently?"

* * *

Time.

Time was the enemy. Time ruined plans, and people, and hopes. Time was an anchor on the dreams of the world, forcing them under a sea of daily necessities until they quietly died. Time was recalcitrant and stubborn, speeding by in seconds during moments that rightly should have lasted forever and dragging miserably on with plodding footsteps as the world grew dark and horrible.

Five days. She thought it was five days since she'd been stolen out of the asylum. There were no windows in the little basement lab, and the silence remained unbroken with the ticking of clocks. She only knew that days were passing as the man in green came and went, shoving food down her throat, cleaning up her messes, and always bobbing his head lightly to the tune of whatever song he had blasting through his earbuds. Once, when Teng had left, she'd seized her chance and begged for help...and the man had frowned, lightly tapped his headphones, and continued mopping the floor.

It had been bad in the asylum. It was worse here. There, at least there were evenings, and weekends, and staff meetings, and time alone to try and think, or plan, or try to escape. Here...here, Teng sat by her bedside, leaving only when the man in green had business to attend to. He was _always_ there, studying her, existing only on naps, coffee, and pure undiluted insanity - taking notes, brewing new horrific concoctions, and always, always smiling.

He had taken pride in his appearance, before. He had been neat and tidy and almost painfully well-groomed. Now, his long, greasy black hair was ruffled where he'd raked excited hands through it as a treatment seemed to work, and rough stubble darkened his chin. Being arrested, losing his position, losing every ounce of respect that anyone may have had for him - he'd obviously taken it very hard indeed.

And he was taking it out on her. The man in green finished rubbing her legs - not that she could feel them anymore - and secured her ankles once again to the edge of the bed. "Please," she asked, gathering every ounce of strength and raising herself against the straps. Pain hammered against her abused muscles as the straps bit into her skin. "_Please_ let me go!"

The man in green, with a blank, uncomprehending stare, shrugged and left the room. The faint hissing of music from his earphones cut off as the heavy door shut behind him.

Sorrow collapsed back onto the mattress, shutting her eyes tight against the fountain of tears that longed to escape. She couldn't cry. She _must not _cry.

She had come up with one, final, last-ditch effort. If it didn't work...she couldn't think about what would happen. It _had_ to work. And in order for it to work, she had to shove down the spinning, sickening emotions in her head and focus totally on her idea, an idea that she loathed.

She had to make him happy.

Teng sprang lightly through the doors, grinning like a kid at Christmas, and skipped directly to the rack of test tubes. He ran shaking fingers over them, picking the particular variation on the formula that he wished to try, and twirled the chosen tube between his fingers as he approached the cabinet full of empty syringes. As an afterthought, he glanced at Sorrow, laying stiffly on her plastic-covered mattress. "And how are we doing on this beautiful morning?"

Sorrow forced her tired, aching face into a pleasant smile. "I'm fine...Doctor," she added. "I've never felt better!" Every cell in her body screamed with pain at the lie.

He froze, eyes blinking rapidly, and slowly set his equipment down. "You're..._fine_?" he asked softly. Sorrow managed a nod of agreement. He swiveled around and leaned casually against the little sink under the cabinet. "Science is a very precise art, dear. Very delicate. Precision is _vital_ to our results. We have to have _order_ and _control_ in our experiments..." Without seeming to move, he was suddenly _there_, on hands and knees on top of her, stubbly, wide-eyed face a mere inch from her own. The stink of grease and obsession filled the air. "_And that means that you do not lie to me_!"

Sorrow shrank back against the bed. Teng propelled himself upright again, dusting himself off as if he'd come into contact with something hideously filthy, and dug around in the discard bin with one hand. "If you _lie_ to me," he continued softly, "we have to start all _over_ again. This is my masterpiece, my raison d'etre, my _life's work_...and I will not have a _liar_ fouling it up!"

For a brief, wild moment, Sorrow was tempted to do nothing but lie. To spout obvious, stupid lies - The sky is brown! My dog has six legs! I wasn't there, I was on the moon...with Steve! - and, in short, to totally ruin any idea he may have cherished about her ever giving him the truth in any way for the rest of time.

But then she saw which tube he'd snagged from the pile. Some of the nasty, yellowish liquid had dripped out of the tiny hole he'd made in the foil covering and slightly smudged the label, but she could still read the name and tell that enough of the liquid remained to make her life a living hell for at least three more days. And he knew how to make _more_ of it...

"No! Please! I'm sorry!" she gasped, trying desperately to move away as he seized her arm and slid the needle in. "I won't lie again! I'm sorry, I'm sorry! You don't have to - have - ha - hahahahaha_hahahahaHAHAHAHA_-"

* * *

The collection of screens that made up the massive computer display in the cave glowed with various images from Gotham's underbelly. A pair of screens at the top scrolled lazily through the files of both Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. The Joker file, which had been open on the left-hand screen so long that his grin had burned into the monitor, remained still. The main screen was full of text - hastily typed, side-by-side reports of the evening from both Barbara and Tim. Out of habit, he caught himself looking for Dick's contribution, and ruthlessly battered the Page Down key to advance the reports.

"This would be easier if you didn't insist on fidgeting," Alfred reminded him as he slipped a needle through both edges of a gaping cut on his shoulder.

"I am not _fidgeting_," Batman grumbled.

"You're also not eating your dinner." Alfred gently tugged the thread until it was nearly taut.

Batman glanced at the tray laying next to him. As far as Alfred was concerned, it didn't matter if he was serving dinner in the cave or in the White House. A meal worth serving was worth serving properly, even if his stubborn employer refused to eat it. Thus, the precisely halved sandwich lay on a bone china plate, with a neatly folded linen napkin and a carafe of icy water waiting nearby on a priceless silver tray.

He shrugged the shoulder that Alfred currently wasn't turning into needlepoint and reached for the mouse. "Ouch!" he protested as the needle poked him in a spot that had to be at least a foot away from any of his various wounds.

"Oh, I am sorry, sir," Alfred said unrepentantly. "I was fully expecting your shoulder to have moved slightly to the right." _Toward the sandwich_. Batman sighed and scooped up the plate, absently tucking the food into his mouth. His eyes flicked over the end of Barbara's report.

The sandwich was unceremoniously deposited on the nearest flat surface. "Lost her?" Batman muttered with growing ire. "_Lost her_?"

Alfred, with the sigh of one who has tried his best, tied off the last knot and collected the forgotten plate. "Sir?"

"They found Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy looking for Sorrow," Batman explained, checking Tim's report. "They said that Arkham lost her."

"And they were, what? Putting up signs?" Alfred said lightly.

"As I understand it, it was more of a door-to-door interrogation." Tim and Barbara had managed to stop them just before they busted into Jim Gordon's house. They had probably reasoned that the Police Commissioner would surely know where she was...right?

He hadn't. Neither had the mayor, the editor of the Gotham Times, the head reporter on Gotham Tonight, the district attorney, the district attorney's secret boyfriend, the guy that sold coffee outside of City Hall, or the random assortment of passersby that looked like they might know something. Both rogues insisted that Sorrow hadn't escaped - how could she, since she couldn't walk? Something bad had obviously happened to her, and they were both very determined to find out what so that it wouldn't happen to them.

Batman scanned the last few lines of the report. Barbara had called Arkham, and they'd gladly told her that Sorrow had been transferred to Gotham General. Tim's call to Gotham General, on the other hand, had resulted in a lot of confusion as the only criminal they had there was in the ICU after being jumped in the lunchroom by some of his ex-buddies - and Sorrow was obviously not a large tattooed man.

Arkham didn't have her. The hospitals didn't have her. The city had already been searched half a dozen times for her, if the two rogues were to be believed, and she was nowhere to be found.

He brooded under the cowl. If the two tonight had been telling the truth, and she really hadn't escaped as he'd thought, that meant that someone had to have taken her. Who would want to take her?

The list of Sorrow's enemies was remarkably short, mostly because a large part of the population who _would_ have appeared there was already dead. He could rule out the Joker, since he was still safely in Arkham. That left only one name.

Reginald Teng.

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: Thanks to Eddie Izzard, Terry Pratchett, 42 Entertainment, and anyone else that I casually referenced without realizing it while I wrote this. This chapter's dedicated to BriDog72, who put a smile on my face. _


	5. The Man In Green

The world is simple when you're a prisoner. When someone else holds the power to make all of your decisions, when someone plans every moment of your day - indeed, when someone holds your life in his hands and might choose to extinguish it on a whim, life becomes extraordinarily simple.

There are two paths to take in a situation such as this. The first, to run screaming into the night, is immensely tricky. Someone would have to be exceedingly lucky and cunning to manage escape from even an average prison. This, however, was not an average prison, and the chances of escape were somewhere in the vicinity of the chances that a magical winged tuna fish would come and sing seven choruses of "La Bamba" at Sorrow.

That left her with only one option - submission. She didn't want to - in fact, obeying Teng made her want to bite through her tongue in frustration - but after the last little incident that had displeased him, it was probably the only way she was going to stay alive long enough to kill him later.

In spite, Teng had snatched the most spectacular of his failures from the discard bin and sprayed nearly double a normal dose into her veins. It had been a remarkably bad decision. She'd almost immediately started laughing, gasping out hilarity at nothing in particular as Teng watched with a smug little smirk on his face. Her stomach muscles had shoved themselves inward as she choked on the laughter boiling out of her throat. Pain had thumped through her abused body like electricity arcing on a Tesla coil.

And then the laughter had wheezed to a halt. Sorrow, arched against the straps that held her to the table, had felt her lungs straining to crumple themselves into tiny, useless balls of tissue as the drug demanded more laughter with no time to inhale. It had been hilarious, and she struggled all the harder to laugh with no air. The thought of her face turning purple with oxygen deprivation had been a joke so funny that Emo Philips himself might have uttered it.

Teng, with a look of disappointment, had grudgingly withdrawn a vial of something clear from the nearest drawer, barking orders for the man in green to come and assist him as he filled a syringe. With the man in green's meaty hands wrapped around her twitching, spasming elbow, unconsciousness had slammed her between the eyes and she'd gone out cold.

That had been earlier this morning. At least, she was fairly certain it had been this morning - there was no way to mark time's passage in the land of the forcibly unconscious - but it certainly felt as if hours had passed. The stabbing ache in her muscles had eased a bit, just like it used to during the long dark nights in her cell.

Sorrow lay on the bed, exhausted, as a vicious headache jackhammered behind her closed eyelids. Cold air from the vent blew gently on her face, setting stray strands of her hair dancing across her forehead. The lingering scent of unwashed, dedicated scientist grew a little stronger as the unseen madman leaned over her, checking to see if she'd woken up yet. She fought to keep her breathing shallow and undisturbed. He let out a small grunt of irritation and settled back into his chair.

"_Submit to the High Clan Kolnar, scumvermin_!"

Sorrow's eyes jerked open as she reflexively tried to scramble away. What in the _hell_...Teng sat at her bedside, grinning, waving a tiny black remote control as he pointed to a new addition: a television with a DVD player.

"So, you are awake," he chuckled. "Good, good. Any problems?"

Her instinctive response, bred from years of hiding her true feelings from the authorities, was to simply say 'I'm fine'. However, since 'fine' had ended up almost killing her last time, she settled for carefully smudged honesty. "My head hurts, and my stomach," she said tentatively. "And I can't feel my legs."

Teng frowned, considering her complaints as if he actually cared about them. Then, shrugging, he dismissed them and gestured toward the television. "I thought that a night off might be appropriate." With a pleasant smile on his face, as if he was watching a movie with a friend instead of his own personal lab rat, he turned the movie back on and settled comfortably in his chair.

The huge, muscled alien invaders onscreen menaced the puny humans in their control room as Sorrow tried not to look like he'd just told her that he was a fish. What was he _doing_? He'd never once in their entire history together done anything remotely nice for her. Had he completely lost whatever was left of his mind? Why was he -

He turned and looked pointedly at her, raising an eyebrow. "You're not watching," he accused lightly. Underneath that shell of a quiet, polite scientist, though, she could sense his black fury at - at what? At merely not watching a _movie_?

"Sorry!" she muttered, turning her eyes to the screen just as an alien did something unspeakable to a pretty blonde. What would Teng possibly have to be angry about? In all fairness, _she_ should be furious at _him_. Hadn't he kidnapped her, and tortured her, and almost killed -

Oh. _Oh_. She was his "perfect subject", wasn't she? Mad scientists didn't like it when they couldn't play with their toys. The thought that he'd have to wait to try again until she recovered from his little _accident_ with the drug earlier probably wasn't making him happy at all.

Teng let out a chuckle. "You didn't laugh," he said, shooting a glare at Sorrow.

"What was funny?" she asked.

"The movie was!" He frowned. "You're clearly worse off than I thought, if you can't manage to laugh at a movie..."

She wasn't in the habit of laughing at brutal alien invasions, but hey, he was the guy in charge...for now. Sorrow obediently squinted at the television, wincing as the odd angle of her neck sent the headache elephants moshing in her brain again, and tried to focus on the movie.

Her efforts mostly failed. When there was a genuine joke, she laughed - and was ordered not to laugh at such ridiculous tripe. When the illustrious Channa Hap outwitted the head alien in a war strategy game, Sorrow tried to look happy - and was immediately told that it was a ridiculous thought. Clearly, the man whispering the moves into her ear was the _true_ hero of the scene, and she was just eye candy.

Two long hours later, Sorrow's brain was numb from the effort of trying to react exactly as Teng wanted. As the three main female protagonists were flash-bombed into blindness, Teng giggled with absolute happiness. The giggles cut off abruptly as Sorrow wearily chimed in.

"You're not fooling me, dear," he said lazily, hitting the pause button. "It just wouldn't be right of me to make you keep pretending." Sorrow, drained from both the effort of playing Let's-Make-Teng-Happy and almost dying, didn't realize what he meant until he turned around with a loaded syringe in his hand.

"No, wait," she said dully. "Don't." But by then, the needle had already gone in. She drew in a long, shuddering breath, and waited. And waited. Sure enough, her lungs started to twitch inside of her like a pair of hyper guinea pigs. Breath exploded from her mouth in a long, whistling wheeze. She wheezed faster, and faster, until she was almost panting - but she wasn't laughing.

Teng's face fell in a scowl. "You can't do anything right, can you?" he snapped at Sorrow, who ignored him in favor of gasping for more air. "Diego!" he called through the open door. There was no answer. "Di_ego_!" he yelled. No answer.

Teng stomped out of the room and dragged the man in green inside, ripping out his earbuds and throwing the man's iPod into the nearest biohazard bin. "Watch her. She's having another reaction to the medication. And keep her quiet - I'm going to sleep." With that, Teng swept out, presumably too disgusted with the entire situation to even bother shutting off the television.

Sorrow wheezed, and panted, and stared with angry eyes at Diego. How could he just stand there and let this happen?

* * *

Diego Eriksen was not a bad man. He babysat his sister's kids, he fed the stray dog that lived behind his building, and he had been known to drop the occasional ten-dollar bill in a beggar's lap.

Unfortunately, the desire to do good is often thwarted by a lack of common sense, a fault which Diego had in abundance. At the moment, he found himself facing a wheezing, desperate patient who looked about as threatening as a sleeping kitten - and yet, she was wrapped in more restraints than he'd ever seen on anyone, even the really violent men in the back wards of the nearby hospital for the mentally unwell.

It occurred to him, as it had more and more frequently these days, that the boss was messed up. This couldn't be legit. Yeah, the money was good, but something wasn't right here. Maybe the money was so good _because_ there wasn't something right here.

"You okay?" he asked uneasily.

With panting, raspy breaths making her sway forward and back, she managed to give him a look of utter, hopeless irritation. She shook her head emphatically _No_.

"What's wrong?"

Again, she speared him with a look of derision. "Can't...breathe," she gasped. "Help...please?"

He frowned. Well, that stuff he'd given her this morning had worked fine. Diego pulled a vial of the stuff from its drawer and filled a syringe, remembering to tap out the bubbles as his nursing instructor long ago had taught him. "Uh...let's try this."

Unlike every other patient in restraints that he'd ever seen, she actually twisted her arm so that he could have easy access to her scarred inner elbow. Yes, there was definitely something not right here. As the drug gradually kicked in, her breathing began to slow down. Cheered by the thought that he'd done something right, he wandered over to the nearest file folder and took a look inside. The least he could do was make sure his boss wasn't doing anything wrong!

Tiny, scribbly text filled the pages inside, running off the lines in the author's haste to commit his thoughts to paper. "Patient S is adjusting slowly to my medication. I'm confident that I'll find a variation that is, at the least, quieter than the current doses. And, in time, my medication will succeed in transforming this thing into a healthy human being."

Diego dropped the folder and stepped back. Patient S...why not a name? Why not refer to her at least by her own initials? The boss had assured him that this girl, this Mary Johnson, was incurably schizophrenic and would rage hatefully against anyone but her trusted doctor - thus why Diego had been encouraged to wear the headphones and tune out whatever she said - and that she'd been placed in Arkham simply because of her violent tendencies. Why call her Patient S, unless...

Unless he'd been lied to. Unless this wasn't Mary Johnson, who needed to be removed from her toxic surroundings in the name of health.

The girl's breathing had slowed to a normal level. Diego turned from the counter and stood by her side, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot as she glared at him. "Who are you?" he asked bluntly.

"My name's Sorrow," she said, licking dry lips.

Not Mary Johnson, then. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place it. "So your family didn't lock you in Arkham just to get rid of you?"

Sorrow rolled bloodshot blue eyes at him. "Is _that_ what he told you?" She squirmed under her straps. "Figures. I don't have a family. I'm not going to have anything, soon enough. He's going to kill me."

"He's only trying to help you," Diego protested.

"Kill or cure, that's Dr. Teng," she sighed. "Why am I bothering? You work for him. You're _like_ him. Why don't you just kill me now, save your boss some effort?"

"He's not trying to kill you!" Diego said.

"He's certainly doing a good impression of it!" Sorrow shot back. "It doesn't matter what he wants. One day, he's going to get pissed off, and stick me full of that _stuff_, and I'll die. It's going to happen. It almost happened today," she added, glaring at him. "Or didn't you remember that?"

"He made a mistake," Diego said uneasily. "He's still trying to help."

"Help!" Sorrow blew a disgusted sigh up her face. "What kind of doctor tests a drug on a patient that he's stolen out of the asylum? He's a nutcase, and as far as I'm concerned, you're a moron if you keep working for him." She turned her face away and glared impotently at the wall.

Diego didn't read the papers. He didn't know who Sorrow was, and he didn't know what kind of drug his boss would be testing on her, but it didn't really matter. The girl was right - real doctors didn't work this way.

Real doctors, come to think of it, didn't pay in cash. Real doctors didn't lavish the sort of singleminded attention that his boss had shown Sorrow in the past week. Real doctors didn't operate out of a basement.

Diego, not for the first time in his life, felt the sick realization that he'd been duped hit him in the gut. This guy, this Teng, wasn't really helping anyone but himself...and there was no reason for him to stick around any longer. "It's not right. He's flipped." He started to unbuckle her straps. "I'm getting you out of here."

Sorrow's head snapped back like a toy on a spring. "Seriously?" Tears streamed down her face as he unwound the straps around her abdomen. Diego examined her wrists, wondering where Teng might possibly keep a handcuff key, and dismissed the thought. If he couldn't find a key, he could probably saw through the cuffs with a hacksaw.

"Hey, don't cry," he said consolingly as he undid the last strap. "You're gonna be okay. Come on, I'll help you." He held out an encouraging hand.

Sorrow shoved herself into a sitting position. "You're...going to have to carry me. I can't feel my legs."

"Sure." He crept to the door, listening intently upstairs for any hint of noise, and trotted back to her bedside. "Up we go. C'mon." She obediently wrapped her arms around his neck and held on tight as he scooped her up like an oversized infant.

The lab disappeared behind them as Diego trudged up the narrow stairs. "I'm going to write you into my will," the girl muttered into his chest.

"Shhh," he cautioned. As quietly as possible, Diego and his quivering new benefactor sneaked out the front door and disappeared in the direction of the nearest parking garage.

* * *

He'd done it. He'd actually taken her out of that nightmare! Sorrow could have kissed him. Hell, she could have covered him in diamonds and named him King of the Universe, if it would have made him happy.

"You got a place to go?" he asked as he settled himself in the driver's seat. Shoving the hospital gown down over her legs, she nodded. She had several places to go - none of them hers.

She had to believe that Teng knew where her hideout was, so she couldn't go home. Fortunately, she'd been paranoid enough in her early days to find out where the biggest names in roguedom lived so that she could purposefully avoid them. Hopefully, one of them still lived at one of their old addresses...

Ivy had three greenhouses in the outskirts of the city. All of them were deserted, with misters fogging the windows when they tried to peer inside. Since the Joker was still in Arkham - something that every Gothamite kept close tabs on, even if the other news bored them stiff - they tried the Ha-Haciendas next. They were all as empty as Ivy's places.

As a last-ditch effort, Sorrow pointed them toward the Riddler's hideouts. She wasn't exactly friends with him, not in the way that she was with Harley or Ivy (and even those friendships were debatable), but he had broken her out of Arkham. There had to be _some_ kind of fellow-feeling there, or why would he have bothered?

Diego's beat-up old blue car lurched to a halt outside the Puzzle Palace. It was completely empty, like all the rest. Sorrow, in total desperation, was about to ask Diego if she could stay at his place when a sleek green car met them coming from the opposite direction. The green door opened to reveal-

"Eddie!" gasped Sorrow, gloved hands colliding with the dashboard as she leaned forward for a better look. The man in the dapper green suit ignored the presence of another car on his street and sauntered toward his door. "Catch him!"

Diego obligingly leaned on the horn. A chorus of sleepy yells rang out from a nearby apartment building. The Riddler turned, raised an eyebrow at the sight of the unfamiliar vehicle, and cautiously approached. "And who, might I ask, are - Sorrow!" he gasped, noticing a familiar face in the passenger seat. His question-marked cane clattered to the ground as he jerked the car door open. "Where the hell have you been? Everyone's been looking for - _oof_!"

Absolute joy at seeing a friendly person who wasn't going to immediately try to kill her overwhelmed Sorrow. "Eddie!" she grinned, latching on to his abdomen like a toddler cuddling a teddy bear. Then, realizing that one probably shouldn't tacklehug their criminal superiors, she pulled back, blushing. "Sorry."

"That's...okay," he stammered. "What happened?"

She raked a gloved hand through her matted hair, grimacing as the rough latexed fingers caught in a tangle. "Teng," she said simply.

"What? But he's in jail!"

"Not anymore." Sorrow shivered as the night breeze crept up her gown. "Can I...I mean, he might know where I live, now...I can't go home..."

Realizations clicked into place. "You want to stay here?" the Riddler asked, slightly taken aback.

"If it's a problem, I can - " Sorrow started miserably.

"No, no, it's just...um...give me two minutes," he said, collecting his cane from the asphalt and dashing inside. The sounds of frantic tidying-up - dishes clattering into the sink, laundry baskets skidding over linoleum, and the constant slamming of the doors of overstuffed closets - rang into the street as Sorrow fidgeted with a loose thread on her filthy hospital gown.

The Riddler reappeared in the doorway. "Okay, come on in," he beckoned, holding the door wide. Diego bundled Sorrow back into his arms and plodded inside, laying her gently on the couch next to a towering stack of notebooks. "You can stay in the extra bedroom, and your..." Eddie paused, blinking as he processed the appearance of a strange man in his living room. "Who is this?"

"This is Diego," Sorrow introduced, massaging a cramped arm muscle with one hand. "He got me out of there." She stretched her arm, scowling at the constellation of scars dotting her skin, and felt a massive yawn split her face in half.

"C'mon, you need some sleep," Diego offered, scooping her back off of the couch. With Eddie pointing the way, he deposited Sorrow in the chosen bedroom and quietly closed the door behind him. In the soft, safe darkness, Sorrow wrapped her complaining arms around her pillow and immediately fell asleep.

* * *

The Riddler watched the strange man tucking Sorrow neatly into his spare bed, thanking the fates that he hadn't had a henchgirl on hand at the moment. This was fantastic! His latest plan, involving the theft of a rare and ancient scroll, would go so much easier if he had someone with powers backing him up. True, he'd have to wait until she got better - or did he? Maybe her new henchman would be willing to cart her around for him. Or no, she could be a decoy! Oh, yes, even if she couldn't walk she'd be an _excellent_ trap, looking frail and helpless right up to the moment that she sent whoever was in touching range into fits of depression on the floor.

Diego closed the door and stepped back into the living room. "How long have you been working for her?" Eddie asked. If Sorrow trusted him, and everyone knew how impossible _that_ was, then surely he was a man you could count on.

Diego shrugged. "Um...a couple hours?"

Eddie's grand plans came to a screeching halt. If he wasn't a henchman, then what did he want with Sorrow? "You'd better tell me who you are," he said quietly.

Diego haltingly obliged, peppering his story with ums and ers as he fumbled his way through the explanation. "...and I only wanted to help her. I still do," he added. "I want to make it up to her somehow. Could I come back tomorrow and give her a hand with...things?"

Eddie slipped his hands into his pockets. "Who said anything about leaving?" he inquired pleasantly. Purple-gloved fingers tapped rapidly on the remote control in his right pocket. Puzzle traps obediently sprang out of the woodwork, lacing themselves firmly over windows and doors.

"What the hell?" Diego said, stumbling backward and sitting down heavily on an ottoman stacked high with newspapers.

"You worked for him," Eddie pointed out. "Do you honestly believe that I'd let you trot over and tell him where she is?" His eyes narrowed. If Teng had come here..."Was that the plan? Two for the price of one?"

"What?" Diego shoved himself to his feet. "Look, I don't know who the hell you think you are, but I'm going home!"

Eddie sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. The man was standing in a green living room, talking to a man in a green suit with a question-marked cane, while electrified puzzle-traps hummed quietly over every possible exit. Who did he _think_ he was? Poison Ivy? His fingers caressed another button. The couch came alive with question-marked streamers, whipping around the man and pinning him firmly to the furniture. He'd really have to thank the clowns for that idea one day...

"Let me go!" Diego screeched. "Let me out of here, you lunatic!"

The man really was dumb as a rock. The temptation was there to crack him across the face with his cane for that lunatic remark, but if he gave in to that temptation every time he was called a lunatic, he'd never have time for anything else.

Besides, he was Sorrow's - and part of surviving as a rogue was not touching other people's toys. Eddie sighed and settled down on the ottoman, trying to form an explanation with the smallest words possible concerning his identity and Diego's place in the grand scheme of things.

* * *

Most people in Gotham dealt with rogues in one of two ways: Obeying or Resisting. Generally, option 2 ended up dovetailing with the never-popular option 3, which usually involved the Gothamite in question being turned into a corpse in a variety of colorful and unusual fashions.

Diego had, unsurprisingly, volunteered to stay inside like a good little civilian and play nursemaid to Sorrow. It hadn't actually taken that much talk to get him to agree with the plan. The man really did want to make things up with Sorrow, a desire that only intensified when he learned that she would nonchalantly kill him if the mood took her, and so he spent his days tending to her while Eddie planned for the inevitable Bat-visit. He'd disappeared from the halfway house a little less than a month ago, and so far, no Bat had darkened his doorstep. Since he was in one of his oldest lairs, that meant it was only a matter of time until they did.

They had been there for about a week. After the first day, a busy time of negotiations, threats and quite a few hours in the workroom with her gloves being sawn off by one of Eddie's endless supply of small sharp things, Sorrow spent most of her time alone in the bedroom, grumbling epithets under her breath as she fought to re-train her stubborn legs into moving again. Diego, with nothing better to do, had been cleaning the lair, making the food, and doing all the other trivial things that Eddie couldn't be bothered with. In fact, even now he was in the kitchen, frying something that smelled like instant artery-death while Eddie relaxed on the couch with a crossword.

The window, and the puzzle-trap over it, shattered inward with a massive sizzling of sparks. Eddie, used to such things, rested a fingernail casually on the little switch that would turn the pen into a tiny firebomb and regarded the caped crimefighter.

"Where's the girl, Nygma?" the Batman graveled.

"Girl? Ah, you're referring to my old flame. Sadly, she went sane. A tragedy, wouldn't you agree?" He feigned wiping a tear from his eye.

"Sorrow," Batman growled. "Where is she?"

Edward shrugged casually and settled back against his cushion. "I've no idea. Should I know?"

"Oh, you mean that girl with the gloves?" came a voice from the kitchen. Diego strolled out, wiping his hands on a small green towel.

The Riddler, robbed of his game, turned and glared at him. "Quiet!"

Batman grabbed the man by the collar and slammed him up against the wall. "Where is she?"

"I…she…Teng! 56 Park Street!"

Batman dropped the man and left without looking at Eddie, who smirked at his back. "**He's on a bear, Mr. Worst**," he called after the receding cape.

* * *

The Batmobile purred to a halt three blocks away from his target. Batman climbed out, twitched his cape into position, and stalked down the street.

The original plan had been to interrogate the Riddler and turn him over to Arkham. That plan had been discarded the instant that the other man had mentioned Teng. He couldn't afford to take the time to personally hand them over to the cops - and leaving the Riddler alone in handcuffs was just about as secure as leaving a squirrel alone in the bottom of an open barrel. By the time he got back, the Riddler would be gone, a thought that did nothing to calm the growling surge of anger in the back of his mind.

56 Park Street was an old brownstone building with rotten boards nailed across the windows. One blow from a heavily booted foot gave Batman an entrance, and he shoved his way inside. Dust coated the debris on the floor. In the dirt, a few scuffed footprints pointed the way to the staircase. Batman crept down them and stood disapprovingly in the doorway.

Lab equipment lay in pieces throughout the room. Teng, sitting crosslegged and sullen on the empty lab table, was pitching broken test tubes at the crumpled remains of a cheap folding chair.

Batman unceremoniously snatched him by the back of the neck and propelled him up the stairs. The thin man wailed with heartbroken frustration and tried to kick backward. Batman ignored him until they got to the street, where he slammed him into the asphalt. "_Where is she_?" he growled, out of patience with the whole situation.

"Who?" Teng whimpered.

"Sorrow!"

Ugly hate twisted Teng's features. "I-I-I don't know where it is!" he wailed. "Someone stole it from me! And I was almost finished with the experiment-" He didn't even get to finish his sentence as his head slammed into the pavement.

A lone police car screeched to a halt at the edge of the scene. Batman handed the bleeding madman over to the cops, an action he'd performed so many times that it had become routine, and swung away into the night. What was the taunt the Riddler had thrown at him as he left…**He's on a bear, Mr. Worst**?

_**Sorrow's here, Batman**_, he realized with a scowl._ Damn it. Damn everything._

* * *

The plan, such as it was, had worked marvelously. A mere minute after Batman had departed, Sorrow, Diego and Eddie had made tracks toward a new lair. Diego's miniscule car wouldn't fit three people and a wheelchair, so Eddie had volunteered to find his own way to his other lair.

At least, that had been the plan.

He hadn't shown up that night. Sorrow, glued to the lair's tiny television set, finally found out what had happened to him thanks to a report on Gotham Tonight.

He'd had the misfortune to get chased halfway from Reatton to Gainsly that first night thanks to an eagle-eyed cop who'd spotted him running a stoplight. Somewhere in Gainsly, he'd made a brief stop to hijack another car and was off again - only to find that he'd not only stolen a car, but a very large and loving St. Bernard as well. The last the cop had seen of him was a large, pink tongue being thoroughly applied to the back of the Riddler's head. The car - and the dog - had later been found parked crookedly behind City Hall.

Eddie himself had been found a few hours later. From what the newspeople had managed to gather about the situation, the Riddler, exhausted, sticky, and reeking of dog, had slumped onto a park bench in his disguise to rest for a moment. He'd promptly fallen asleep in the golden summer sunshine. A park guard, on the lookout for vagrants, had almost shooed him away before he saw the little green question marks all over the man's black necktie. Eddie had woken up, cranky and befuddled, to find a news crew standing over him as a squadron of cops ratcheted a pair of handcuffs firmly around his wrists.

Gotham Tonight had gone on to briefly mention the capture of one Reginald Teng by the Batman - news that sent Sorrow into a gleeful fit of ecstasy for the rest of the night. She was almost tempted to hire some guys and finish the job the Joker had started...but no, she wanted to do this _right_.

And since Teng was no longer a threat, it was probably safe to go home for a while. Not _permanently_ - Batman, after all, knew where she lived, and no one was going to be throwing _him_ into jail any time soon - but long enough to check around and evict any troublesome passersby that might have had the wrong idea about moving in.

First, though, she'd have to find something else to wear. Eddie had gladly lent her some spare outfits that his previous girls had left behind - but they all tended to be rather..._distinctive_ for daytime wear. At the moment, she was dressed in an eye-searingly-green sequined minidress with violently purple question marks. Eddie's girls had _no_ taste.

Diego, not really wanting to stroll around town with someone who looked like a cross between a toad with the flu and a disco ball, agreed to help her look for new clothes in the tiny lair. One brief search of the closets later, they'd turned up one (1) plain green t-shirt, two (2) pairs of question-print boxers, and one (1) bright green, question-mark coated, spandex sequined unitard. After the laughter died down enough so that they could speak again, Sorrow said "Maybe I should just turn my dress inside out."

With plan Inside-Out in motion, they made their way down to the docks the next morning. They kept to the waterfront, acting like tourists and laughing happily with one another. Eventually, they broke free of the happy-laughing-idiot crowd and hurried down a filthy alleyway, ducking quickly into the secret entrance to Sorrow's old warehouse.

Diego whistled as he looked around the enormous empty building. "And this is yours?"

"Fair 'n' square," she nodded absently, wheeling over to the little room where she kept her possessions and her money. "I'll be right back."

She checked the inside of the wall safe first. Her share of all those jobs from so long ago was still there, packaged up neatly in all those bright little wrappers. She turned to her closet next and frowned. Her clothes, her _real_ clothes, were locked away at Arkham. The only clothes left here were street clothes, disguises, incognito stuff...and a winter costume, but it was far too hot for wool. Still, being in street clothes had to be better than Swamp Thing meets the Princess of Punctuation. She reached into the closet, frowned, and pounced on her winter costume. The cheap latex gloves caught on the wool as she pulled her prize out of the pockets - a brand-new set of her own gloves. The stupid latex ones ended up in a pile on the floor as she lovingly slid her hands into her gloves. Then, with a lot of wriggling and not a few muttered curses against her numb legs, she changed herself into some jeans and a t-shirt and threw a few more outfits in a bag, along with the green dress Eddie'd lent her.

When she wheeled herself back out, the main room was deserted. "Diego?" she called. "Hey, Diego!" There was no answer. Concerned, she wheeled into the safest room in the whole place - the kitchen. "Diego...oh, _there_ you are. All the food's gone bad by now…"

He was holding a vaguely familiar piece of paper. She blushed furiously and snatched it out of his hand. "Y'know, it's not proper etiquette to read suicide notes that aren't addressed to you, Diego."

"When?" he asked softly.

"A...a while ago. The first time that Teng..." She shook her head. "It doesn't matter." With short, jerky movements, she balled up the thing and threw it in the trash.

"It matters!" he protested. "You wanted to kill yourself!"

"Yeah, well, you would have too," she muttered.

"No! I mean, you've gotta have hope," he said. "You didn't think that maybe it'd get better?"

Sorrow stared at him as if he had declared the world to be made of pudding. "Hope is for people who don't know anything about life," she informed him flatly. "You can't trust hope."

"But it _did_ get better," he insisted. "You're here, aren't you?"

She slammed a fist down onto her wheelchair. "Oh, I'm _here_ all right," she spat venemously. "Here in this chair. That's where hope gets you. Things never get better, Diego, they just keep going until you die."

"Oh," he said quietly.

"Let's go," she said, turning herself toward the door. "I don't want to be here anymore."

"Whatever you say," Diego agreed, wheeling her back out into the hot, smoggy sunshine of a Gotham afternoon.

That night, while she slept, Diego made a phone call.

* * *

There were some things that Sorrow had never done. Going for a walk in the park at sunrise was one of them - but Diego had insisted, and he'd even volunteered to treat her to breakfast afterward. He was being incredibly nice. Sorrow had suspiciously examined that thought for a while, and then shrugged it off. People who had been tied up and threatened by one of Gotham's rogues often tended to be extraordinarily polite and eager to please. Besides, it _had_ been partly his fault that Teng had gotten her in the first place. A week of almost slave-like devotion wasn't nearly enough to make up for the pain he'd caused her, no matter how nice he'd been acting.

Most of the flowers had bloomed and died, now, and green leaves dominated the park as they strolled along. Squirrels, who had evolved a startling disinterest in trees ever since Poison Ivy came to town, skittered back and forth across the grounds. The clear, green scent of the plants was almost enough to block out the constant tang of sweaty garbage that most Gothamites took for granted with every breath.

Branches shook as if a tornado was whipping the air around them into a frenzy. "Run!" Sorrow ordered, fighting to pry off a glove as Batman and Robin burst from the foliage. Diego obediently took to his heels, leaving Sorrow alone. "I meant _with me_!" she screamed after him.

Robin pounded down the path, chasing her errant caretaker. As she caught a trembling finger under the wrist of one glove, a pair of solid black hands locked themselves around hers. "Stop it," Batman ordered calmly.

"You stop it!" she snapped. "Where were you when I needed you, huh? What's the matter, is catching criminals while they're actually hurting people too _boring_ for you now?" She tried to wrestle out of his grip. "Let me _go_!"

"You need help."

"The only help I need from _you_ is for you to let me go!" She tugged on his arms again. "Hint, hint," she said exasperatedly. "I let _you_ go, remember?"

"When you had no other option," Batman reminded her.

"I had an option! I could have killed you! Is that what you wanted? Let me go, we'll try again."

Batman carefully pulled her hands apart and lifted her out of the chair by the wrists. "Hey!" she protested, wriggling helplessly in midair. "Put me down!"

He obliged by dropping her straight into the seat of her chair. Instinctively, her hands went to the arms of the chair to catch herself. Rattlesnake fast, the Batman lashed out with a set of cuffs and pinned them together.

"You're such a _jerk_," Sorrow muttered. "How'd you know I was going to be here, anyway?" Her eyes narrowed with pure fury. "Diego," she hissed. "_He_ told you. That's why he wanted to come here." He'd been so upset when he found that stupid suicide note and he hadn't talked to her all the way back home. He must have thought she still wanted to kill herself, particularly when she'd said all that stuff about hope...the idiot.

Batman disappeared behind her and wheeled her down the path to the park's exit. As they turned the corner, they could see a police van with a slowly flashing set of lights parked outside. Sorrow wasn't watching the lights, or the cops waiting outside dressed uncomfortably in full biohazard gear.

No, she was picturing that little rat Diego, and planning just what she was going to do to him for this. Arkham could only hold her so long. Once she had her legs back, she was going to tell him just what she thought of his _concern_ for her well-being.

She was going to be awfully busy once she got back into Gotham, that was certain. It was going to be messy, and it was going to be exhausting.

It was also going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

* * *

_Author's Note: Teng's movie, which doesn't exist on film, is really the book 'The City Who Fought' by Anne McCaffrey. _

_Tune in next time for 'Reciprocity', or if you prefer some non-Sorrow stuff, 'Freak Accidents' is always available as well. Eddie and Jackie will return in a couple of weeks, if everything goes according to plan. Thanks for reading!_


End file.
